PARK AVENUE ARMORY

Park Avenue Armory is dedicated to supporting unconventional works in the visual and performing arts that need non-traditional spaces for their full realization, enabling artists to create, students to experience, and audiences to consume epic and adventurous presentations that cannot be mounted elsewhere in New York City. THE OFFICE has served as line producers for events at the Park Avenue Armory, including Tree of Codes (2015) and Oktophonie (2013), and has brought other work we produced to the vast space of the Drill Hall including William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load (2018) and Hal Willner’s adaptation of Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish (2012), with music by Bill Frisell and visuals by Ralph Steadman.

Dancers within Olafur Eliasson’s design. [Photo: Joel Chester Fildes]

TREE OF CODES

Visual art, electro-pop, and contemporary dance intersect in an illuminating new work directed by award-winning choreographer Wayne McGregor, artist Olafur Eliasson, and producer/composer Jamie xx. Performed by fifteen soloists and dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet and Company Wayne McGregor, this new type of modern dance layered classical and contemporary styles with visual wizardry and sonic imagination. The evening-length work took as its starting point Jonathan Safran Foer’s enigmatic publication, at once a novel and a piece of art created by making incisions into the pages of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. Utilizing Foer’s merging of genres and sculptural techniques, the piece featured a site-specific environment that reinvented the performance space with a shape-shifting kaleidoscope of light, color, and reflective mirrors that challenged preconceived notions of the role of the viewer from the moment they entered the Drill Hall.

Audience in the round on Tiravanija’s stage. [Photo: Marcus Yam]

OKTOPHONIE

Karlheinz Stockhausen is one of the most significant composers of modern and electronic music, influencing artists from The Beatles to Bjork, Miles Davis to Animal Collective to Frank Zappa. Performed by one of his original collaborators Kathinka Pasveer, the maverick composer’s OKTOPHONIE from his opus Licht received an exciting new life in this epic production of the monumental composition. Acclaimed contemporary visual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija staged the work as the composer originally intended—in outer space—creating a lunar floating seating unit to fully envelop the listener in octophonic sound. Adorned in white, the audience took a ritualistic musical journey from plunging darkness into blinding light to fully immerse themselves in the all-encompassing score and surroundings. The vastness of the Drill Hall served as the perfect setting to fully realize this rarely performed work that Stockhausen so boldly envisioned in its New York premiere.

[Banner photo: James Ewing/courtesy of Park Avenue Armory]

PARK AVENUE ARMORY

TREE OF CODES

OKTOPHONIE

THE ROLEX MENTOR AND PROTÉGÉ ARTS INITIATIVE

WATERLICHT 2019