Paul Pfeiffer: Amazing Grace / RGB
The Apollo Theater, New York, NY
November 11, 2019
Artistic Production | Acquisition Grant
A Performa Commission, Performa 19
Sited in the historic Apollo Theater, Paul Pfeiffer’s two-part project for Performa 19 explores the manufactured nature of collective experience through the sonic rituals of the football game. Amazing Grace / RGB marks the occasion of Pfeiffer’s first foray into live performance. Part one, titled University of Georgia Redcoat Band: Live at The Apollo, stages fifty members of the University of Georgia’s Redcoat Marching Band in the Apollo theater, far away from their normal habitat at a college football game. At the UGA—where Pfeiffer spent two years as an artist in resident—bursts of music mirror the starts and stops of the action on the football field in Sanford Stadium, powerfully fueling the dramatic arc of the game and heightening the emotional response of the spectator. In Pfeiffer’s orchestration at the Apollo, the band performed a two-and-a-half-hour game score divorced from the action, defamiliarizing the rituals of sports spectatorship and problematizing a complex host of issues attendant to American football. This immersive performance was filmed by ex-UGA football players. Trained by Pfeiffer to capture live footage for a subsequent film, these former football players-turned-filmmakers effectively reverse the gaze of the audience, using the camera to observe those who would otherwise observe them on game day. Footage from the Apollo will be integral to the second part of the project, a subsequent video installation to be presented in 2020.
In 2005, Performa launched the first biennial entirely dedicated to the development of live art. Conceived as a “museum without walls” and presented in various venues across New York City, Performa 19 marks the biennial’s eighth iteration and coincides with the centennial of the founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. In celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the legendary art and design school, Performa 19 showcases commissions from American and international artists who respond to the Bauhaus’ revolutionary approach to performance.
University of Georgia Redcoat Band Live is the first part of a two-part project, which will result in a video, sound and sculpture installation, to be presented in 2020.
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CREDITS
University of Georgia Redcoat Band Live is curated by Kathy Noble, Senior Curator and Manager of Curatorial Affairs, assisted by Uchenna Itam, Curatorial Assistant, Performa 19. Co-commissioned with VIA Art Fund and supported by Agnes Gund, Shelley and Donald Rubin and the Performa Commissioning Fund. Musical direction and composition by Brett Bawcum, Associate Director, Athletics Bands, The University of Georgia.
Image: Paul Pfeiffer, University of Georgia Redcoat Band Live, 2019. Still from footage for Performa 19. Courtesy of the Artist.
