W Magazine Videos
- Go to WMagazine.com
-
Subscribe to 'W Magazine' on YouTube to keep up with all of our latest videos and shows.
When autocomplete results are available use up and down arrows to review and enter to select.
Ryan McNamara’s “Battleground”: Behind the Scenes of the Artist’s Guggenheim Performance
An exclusive look at the artist’s three-night-only performance in the Guggenheim Museum’s Wright-designed Peter B. Lewis Theater, featuring cosplay costumes and epic dance battles.
Released on 5/5/2016
Credits
Starring: | Ryan McNamara |
Featuring: | Fan Zhong |
Producer: | Biel Parklee |
Transcript
00:02
(background chatter)
00:10
In some ways this is the weirdest piece
00:12
I've ever made and the most traditional.
00:14
(upbeat music)
00:30
But the idea for the piece actually came
00:31
a lot from the space.
00:34
One thing I felt right away is
00:36
that it has the feeling
00:38
of a 1960's sci-fi spaceship.
00:42
Another thing it reminded me of
00:43
was a European parliamentary room.
00:45
I also at the time was reading about
00:47
the Hadron particle collider,
00:49
and so you had this sci-fi aspect,
00:52
then you had this parliamentary room
00:54
where people get mad at each other and beat each other up.
00:57
And then you had the science of these particles
00:59
colliding into each other, so I started thinking
01:01
about the idea of a battle.
01:08
♫ I need somebody
01:13
♫ to love tonight
01:23
[Ryan] It's not something,
01:24
especially the dancers I work with,
01:25
are usually in anything that has a narrative.
01:28
So that is a traditional aspect of it,
01:30
there is a storytelling element.
01:32
And now I think that, that is something
01:34
that I'm interested in, is taking what's
01:37
traditionally accepted as performance and tweaking it.
01:43
♫ Swallowing diamonds, a cutting throat
01:46
♫ Your teeth when you grin reflecting beams on tombstones
01:56
♫ A jamboree of surprises...
01:58
Yeah, I'm definitely trying to use the space in ways
02:01
that it hasn't been used before.
02:04
So once I felt like I had utilized
02:09
every inch of this,
02:10
I started thinking even beyond the theatre.
02:13
Perhaps ideas of it then continues forever.
02:16
Just when you think the piece is over,
02:19
it's not over (laughs)