Go West, Performers
By
July 29, 2009
Fashion-obsessed, design-loving Kanye West has claimed everyone from Pierre Hardy to Takashi Murakami as inspiration for his signature style. Now, in the new production “WHY WON’T YOU LET ME BE GREAT!!!,” he serves as a muse to the emerging and established indie theatre performers assosciated with the Catch collective, which curates a monthly artist’s series. This will be their largest scale performance thus far.
Titled after Kanye’s now infamous January blog freakout, the project premieres tomorrow, Thursday, at PS122 in the East Village. It’s based on West’s 2008 album 808 and Heartbreak, with each participant presenting an interpretation of one of the album’s 12 tracks. OBIE winner Kenny Melman takes a seat at the piano for “Street Lights”; Myles Kane live-mixes a video piece for the single “Paranoid”; and performance art provocateur–you may remember when she stripped naked and flailed around in her late dog’s ashes–Ann Liv Young hasn’t even announced her take on “Love Lockdown.” Organizer Brendan Kennedy says the idea sprung from his appreciation of the Joffrey Ballet’s 1993 production “Billboards,” a dance piece set to the music of Prince. Kennedy recruited fellow performer Neal Medlyn, who approached Catch with the intention of creating what he calls a “platform for combining young, downtown dance and multi-platinum pop music.”
WHY WON’T YOU LET ME BE GREAT!!! opens Thursday, July 30, at PS122.
