“When I need to escape, when I need to work something out, I just let it go on the dance floor,” explains Cave. Conceptually, The Let Go hearkens to club culture of the 1970s and ‘80s. For Cave, who trained with Alvin Ailey, dance is as much emotional catharsis as political act. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman.īut rather than lament reality, the Armory dance party-like his Soundsuits-is a form of empowerment. “So I’m thinking, Wow, this is how she is going to be spending her time, trying to comfort and bring a sense of security to our student body.” “Since fall, she has had to write about six letters to the campus addressing current affairs, which is very unusual,” he says. How do you process that every day? You are dealing with your own shit and then on top of this, you are thinking, Oh god, what is going on in our country?”Ĭave, a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, describes the stream of letters the school’s president Elissa Tenny has issued this past academic year. “It is a different type of presidency with behavior that we have never, ever experienced before. ![]() “We are all in distress as we are just trying to bring a level of understanding to the state of the political climate,” Cave explains. There is also a schedule of Let Go community events: a Freedom Ball, outrageous costumes encouraged Up Right dance performances, orchestrated by Cave and accompanied by the baritone of Jorell Williams and Vy Higginsen’s Sing Harlem Choir. Part installation, part discotheque, from June 7 through July 1, Cave transforms the conservancy’s 55,000-square-foot Drill Hall into a kinetic frenzy-with live music, DJ sets, school groups, church choirs, hula hoopers, Soul Train lines, Twister games and yes, Soundsuit invasions. ![]() This is the central dogma of The Let Go, Cave’s grand, carnivalesque summer fling for the Armory: dance party as both rejuvenation and protest. After nearly two years digesting the rise of this administration, he is ready to unveil his artistic response to the 45th president of the United States: a gargantuan, shiny multisensory haven to speak our minds and move our bodies-to coalesce and reclaim a sense of freedom. While politics have always galvanized resistance and self-expression in artists, there is an existential urgency today that he describes as “a collective sense of wading far into unprecedented, choppy waters.” But what if we could release our frustration and fatigue through movement? His voice is quiet and resolute, with the slightest trace of his Missouri origins. Yet now, Cave says, we have officially entered unchartered territory. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman. ![]() Aesthetically, Cave described the experience as being inside “the belly of a Soundsuit,” posing the rhetorical question: is there racism in heaven? Scattered with lawn jockeys and images of guns and teardrops, the exhibition was designed to instigate dialogue on social injustice. In 2016, his paradisiacal Until-as in “guilty until proven innocent”-deployed millions of plastic beads and over 10 miles of crystal across a football field expanse at MASS MoCA. In 2013, collaborating with Creative Time, his performance piece HEARD NY infiltrated Grand Central Station with a dance troupe in colorful horse-sized Soundsuits, in an attempt to force commuters from their daily fugue to an innovative dream state. Referencing African masquerade and religious vestments, Soundsuits bestow a second skin on their wearers, obviating inherent biases about race, gender and class.Ĭave made his first Soundsuit from twigs in 1992, a response to the LAPD beating of Rodney King. But his rainbow sculptures are more than a shiny array of tassels, pipe cleaners and synthetic hair. It is a remarkable statement from a contemporary artist whose life’s work has addressed what it means to be a black man in America.Ĭelebrated for his iconic Mardi-Gras-meets-Muppet Soundsuits-named for their swish and rustle when worn, and what he calls his “bling-bling sparkle-sparkle factor”-Cave has woven fantasy and flash mob into his lexicon. “We live in exhausting times and we are all in need of a savior,” Nick Cave tells me as we settle into one of the Park Avenue Armory’s 19th-century period rooms.
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