Saturday we celebrated the start of the holiday season with a cultural outing to Minneapolis. We started at our usual breakfast place, Moose and Sadie’s, whcih always makes me feel like I’m in Chicago. Great cornmeal pancake with rhubarb sauce and then off to Aria, two blocks away, to see David Byrne’s sound installation, “Playing the Building.”
The installation consists of an organ hooked up by tubes to a series of pipes, hammers and motors mounted to the walls. When you play a key, it makes a sound by striking the building or activating a motor or blowing wind through a pipe. The hammers strike actual plates and pipes in the building, but the pipes that whistle were made for the installation. I couldn’t locate the motors but I assume they’re also brought in for the piece.
The space is the best thing about the piece. It’s the former home of Theatre de la Jeune Lune, a great avant garde theater in downtown Minneapolis that closed in 2008. The space, Aria, is currently available for private events and this is the first art installation.
The place has a curtained off stage and a set of balconies that make one wall look like a Chris Ware apartment building with the outer wall removed, a doll house, a really great stage.
When you walk up to the second level, there are more clanging panels and also beautifully staged rooms, two with Crosley record players so you can play Coltrane or other records in the stacks there. That was actually music, and lovely.
In the end, there are many things that could be done in that building. Personally, I’d rather see a play there. It would be a great place to stage something with multiple scenes going on simultaneously in different rooms on the balcony. And below…… a brief concert…