SOMEWHERE I READ

Arto Lindsay

• Duffy Square, 7th Avenue between 46th and 47th St.

Acclaimed musician and artist Arto Lindsay will design and organize a multidisciplinary procession, “SOMEWHERE I READ,” featuring over 50 dancers and performers. Serving as Performa 09’s opening event, Lindsay’s procession will proceed down a major street in Manhattan on the same day as the New York Marathon (November 1). A central element of the piece will be the use of cell phones as musical instruments in a sort of pared-down marching band. All the participants will carry cell phones playing music specially composed by Lindsay.  An inventive adaptation of the standard parade format, Arto Lindsay’s Performa Commission will create an oddly intimate public spectacle across New York City’s main streets.

Born in the United States in 1953 and raised in Brazil during the heyday of the 1960s Tropicália movement, the multi-faceted songwriter, producer, vocalist, and guitarist Arto Lindsay is known for his unique fusion of Brazilian music and the downtown avant-garde. A pioneer of punk jazz and no-wave, Lindsay was a catalyst of the 1980s Lower East Side noise rock scene. Acclaimed by visual artists he has collaborated with,among others, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Ernesto Neto and Vito Acconci. Lindsay started working with the parade as an art form in 2004 with De Lama Lamina, a collaboration with Mathew Barney for the Salavdor de Bahia Carnival that paid tribute to the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé and explored some of its aesthetic and social implications,. In 2008, the Staedelschule and the Museum fur Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt invited him to put on a parade. “I AM A MAN,” an eleven-part parade featuring robot dogs, a group of philosophers, cheerleaders, a German brass band, and punk rock musicians, among other participants, addressed the constraints borne and liberations achieved by the contemporary body.

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