This August, five groups of Teen Reviewers and Critics (TRaC) ventured out into New York City to take in some culture. After attending a Thursday performance, everyone wrote reviews, then reconvened the following Tuesday for a discussion and workshop. Our work is published here in the first of a five part series featuring writing from the Summer TRaC!
Summer TRaC Session 1 visited an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art featuring turntable pioneer Christian Marclay. Check out the excerpts and full reviews below….
“Christian Marclay’s “Festival” at the Whitney Museum of Art is an experiment of the ‘fusion of image and sound through collage, performance, installation, photography, sculpture, and video.’ In other terms, it is a smorgasbord of all things musical.” – Elizabeth Sherwood
Read ELIZABETHS’s full review.
“Along the walls, you see a single line of words, seemingly describing what you had just heard in the show, or were about to hear. […] those sentences tied everything in the room together.” – Kayla Somar
Read KAYLA’s full review.
“Viewers are encouraged to write something on the massive chalkboard that is covered in staff lines […] I learned that ‘Teresa ♥’s Julian,’ ‘Emma wuz here,’ […], and what was perhaps my favorite: a regretful sentiment somebody wrote about how they wish that they had taken piano lessons.” – Jane Handorff
Read JANE’s full review.
“Interactive art is what this is, most museums won’t let any one touch a thing but yet now we can draw on the wall.” – Kayla Vialva
Read KAYLA’s full review.
“[…] intriguing in theory, the piece is just an unsettling battle of wills […] On guitar, Mary Halverson strums random, disconnected chords after another, contending with Ikue Mori’s drum machine-style clips of shattering glass.” – Sharon Mizrahi
Read SHARON’s full review.
“At some points the speakers oozed out the sound of soothing rain, another reminder of the weather the sheet music was exposed to. Accompanying the speakers was a guitar occasionally playing familiar tunes or chords and at other times seemingly haphazard notes.” – Kirsten Rischert
Read KIRSTEN’s full review.
“The dissonant tunes and complexed rhythms of this performance bring the most skilled listeners back to some other performances, such as Georges Asperghis’s latest production: Les Boulingrins.” – Victoire Bourhis
Read VICTOIRE’s full review.
“[…] certain combinations of sound and rhythm have the power to evoke such extreme responses in people. Music is at once less and more than physical. It is nourishing, like food, and yet invisible, like gas. Is music a fart?” – Phoebe Nir
Read PHOEBE’s full review.
“[…] sounds may include high shrills, popcorn sizzling, cork popping, water dripping, sawing, glass breaking, and everyday sounds of annoyance.” – Chui Yu Lau
Read CHUI YU’s full review.
Tagged as:
Christian Marclay,
Summer TRaC,
Teen Reviewers and Critics,
Whitney Museum of American Art
Some shows tug at your heartstrings. Next to Normal tugs at them, yanks at them, and tears them apart.
The show opens on a seemingly normal suburban family. The set is flat, three stories consisting of boxes, like a perfect little dollhouse. A mother, a father, a sister, a brother. The father goes to work, and the children go to school. The mother makes the sandwiches. Living an ordinary, normal life. Well, trying to. Before the mother collapses, and is having an “attack”. Slowly, gradually, the characters’ troubles unfold before us. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Booth Theatre,
Next to Normal
As I stepped up to the Lincoln Center Fountain for the International Body Music Festival, the first signs of performance art I witnessed were similar to what you may see in the streets of China town in New York or San Francisco. A group of five danced around with a big lion, clanging cymbals, and waving bright orange pieces of fabric. This “Lion Dance” wasn’t anything new or original; nothing I hadn’t seen before. The group moved from near the fountain over to the outdoor stage where we were to set our attention for the main attraction.
For the first approximately 17 minutes of the concert itself, two women, seemingly very close (turns out they were cousins), stood in the middle of the stage, holding each other, and sharing one microphone. They were “throat singing”, which they described to us (the audience) as “competing with their voices.” They completed six sets of their throat singing, which was a little too much. More interesting than the performance itself was observing the reactions of the people watching it. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Barbatuques,
Celina Kalluk,
Derique McGee,
International Body Music Festival,
Keith Terry,
Lincoln Center Out of Doors,
Lucie Idlout,
SLAMMIN All-Body Band
A universal language that we all speak is music, and we can use our bodies in many different ways to create it. After nearly three hours at the International Body Music Festival Concert, presented as a part of Lincoln Center Out of Doors, all of the performers deliver a mind-blowing, collaborative encore which feels like it will last through the night. Although by this point most of the audience members have already dispersed, the performers aren’t frazzled. In fact, they make a rather admirable choice and raise their energy even more.
I knew that I was in for something special when the festival started off on a high note in Josie Robertson Plaza with the Lion Dance. I was immediately overcome with a flow of color and sound when these performers claimed their twenty minutes of fame. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Barbatuques,
Celina Kalluk,
Derique McGee,
International Body Music Festival,
Keith Terry,
Lincoln Center Out of Doors,
Lucie Idlout,
SLAMMIN All-Body Band
$5 Tickets
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