Had the chance today to spend some more time in the exhibition my friend J has curated, "Voice of My City: Jerome Robbins and New York," at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. It's a remarkable selection of documents from a remarkable life, including videos of dance (Robbins, too) and also home videos shot by Robbins himself, inviting us to learn to see the city the way he did. Organizing the show around New York as Robbins' muse is effective as tribute both to a great choreographer and to the city he set in motion, letting us see both with new eyes. I can't do it justice with a handful of images - luckily it's up through next March! (Above are drawings of Robbins' to Bach's Goldberg Variations, when he'd snapped an achilles' tendon and couldn't dance in late 1969.)What took me up to Lincoln Center was in fact opera - I bought tickets for when my Japanese friend H arrives end of next month (Pêcheurs des Perles, Traviata) - and opera awaited at the end of the day too, a different experience of the voice of this city. It was the "Mile-Long Opera," a work conceived by the architects of the High Line, which brought together poets Claudia Rankine and Ann Carson, composer Peter Lang, and one thousand singers from choirs from across the five boroughs to offer "A Biography of 7 O'Clock." Tickets were scooped up quickly - I got ours five minutes after they became available, when most had already been claimed - but you can experience it vicariously here.
It too defies summary, an immersive experience of walking past singers, their faces variously illuminated, singing or speaking, generally softly, a few times in a sort of chorus. The words, distilled from interviews with New Yorkers, rippled and repeated, reappearing in a new voice to a new face, close enough that eye contact was hard to avoid... and one didn't want to avoid it. A sometimes overwhelming intimacy characterized the experience, a sense of what it would be like if we could truly connect with all the people we encounter, trust them with ourselves. A recurrent refrain, heard always across several singers:
No, we don't talk but people get to know each
other just by walking past each other all the time
On a warm night after rain in the already surreal environs of the High Line and the futuristic city growing around it, it was deeply dreamlike. It took about ninety minutes, moving slowly but steadily with the crowd, and at the end we received the program, with the whole text. I'd ambiently picked up much of it - enough of it, it turns out! - except for the final section (left), ironically rendered inaudible by a helicopter landing by the river.