The Met Breuer,New York
On Sunday, as the audience discussed the violence at the Trump rally, and Vijay Iyer’s work with writer Teju Cole seemed to sum up the fearful moodThe pianist,composer and educator Vijay Iyer is no stranger to topicality. In oratorio-meets-improvisational recordings such as Holding It Down: the Veterans’ Dreams Project, Iyer and his chosen collaborators are keen to address modern issues like drone warfare and what the pianist has described as the American military’s “de facto ‘poverty draft’.” He’s also open to the idea of serendipitous commentary: the promotional text for Iyer’s current residence, and Relation (which is at the Met Breuer through 31 March),advertises “a succession of short performances that set up unexpected relationships between the artists and the audience.” Iyer and his artistic partners made profitable on that promise on Sunday – on the very same morning that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump created headlines by announcing he was “looking into the idea of paying the legal fees of a supporter who had already admitted to sucker-punching an African American protester earlier in the week. While queuing external the Breuers small, ground-floor performance space, and I heard multiple patrons whispering approximately Trump,including a pair of women who agreed that historical comparisons between fascists of yore and the founder of Trump University were starting to sound legitimate to them (after previously seeming irresponsible).
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com