text: ‘Foreign Bodies’ – New York Philharmonic present Salonen double bill
  19th January 2018
  In Foreign Bodies, video designer and director Tal Rosner will manipulate live-feed images of the players and conductor on stage. Mr. Rosner writes that he will ‘animate textural shifts and instrumental gestures, creating a performance that is in effect a closed circuit –– where the flow of sound and projected images are inherently intertwined. It is a hyper-synched video interpretation of the orchestral piece, drawing inspiration from action paintings and expressionist abstractions. The elemental yet simple approach is rooted in Salonen’s own reading of his composition, prioritizing ‘the physical reality of the music, i.e., the sound itself,’ and celebrating the wild rhythmical variety in the piece.’
  The New York Times called Wayne McGregor’s Obsidian Tear ‘a choreographic breakthrough.’ He titled the work after the Native American legend about obsidian, volcanic rock formed when lava cools rapidly: a tribe of warriors leap to their deaths over a cliff rather than be defeated by the invading US cavalry, and their families’ tears become obsidian. Mr. McGregor says he found a similarity between obsidian and Nyx, the Greek goddess of night: ‘Her darkness, her deep unknowability, arising from some hidden source, but also her shimmering almost-translucence, the aspect of night which thins the membrane between worlds so that truths are half-glimpsed in dreams.’
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