Between numbers Byrne addresses the audience directly, spinning amusing tales about where these songs came from (he wrote “I Zimbra,” with its lyrics by German Dada poet Hugo Ball, to respond to a challenge thrown down by his friend and collaborator Brian Eno), or urging us to fulfill our civic responsibilities (he uses a lighting trick to show how badly the citizenry is represented when only 20 percent of the population votes). This is a setting, a world, where certain essential problems have been worked out, creating the space and freedom to play.Īnd so even the songs every longtime Byrne or Talking Heads fan knows well-like “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody),” a moonlit cottage in ballad form, or the wriggly-waggly noodle dance “Slippery People”-take on new shapes and new life. The grand scheme is elegantly simple, yet never chilly. (The choreography is by dance veteran Annie-B Parson.) All the performers, including Byrne, wear identical lunar-gray suits, and all are barefoot the stage is bordered on three sides by a shimmery chain-link curtain. The musicians are also dancers and singers: their instruments are strapped to their bodies, untethered to any bulky sound equipment, which leaves them free to move and dance around the stage in a series of elegantly orchestrated numbers, with Byrne often at the center-though sometimes lurking at the edges, like living fringe-of the proceedings. But his desire to connect is robust, and it vitalizes everything that happens onstage during American Utopia. Even at age 68, he’s still like an alien learning the rules of the planet. It’s a principle so glaringly simple that it’s radical.īyrne is an admittedly weird ambassador for the idea of connection: he isn’t what you’d call a naturally warm presence, at least not in Earth terms. The idea is that to survive-to live in any meaningful way-we must stay connected. There’s an urgency to it, as if Byrne and his troupe of 11 musicians and dancers were staking their ground in a battle we shouldn’t even have to fight. The music-some numbers drawn from Byrne’s 2018 album American Utopia, others from his body of work with Talking Heads, and one a cover (of Janelle Monáe’s 2015 protest anthem “Hell You Talmbout”)-feels fresh and familiar at once, inclusive but also mildly explosive. 17, is art that has been built, a work of great joy and expressiveness, a tower of song with room for everybody. David Byrne’s American Utopia, Spike Lee’s grand and glorious filmed record of the hit Broadway show of the same name coming to HBO Oct. Sometimes to make art, you’ve got to build art, to layer ideas, colors, values and textures until you’ve shaped the thing that says what you want to say.
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