Contemporary Color – 2017
Contemporary Color
Director: Bill Ross IV, Turner Ross
Documentary
107 min
USA
Show Times:
Tuesday, April 4, 5:00 PM
Thursday, April 6, 7:00 PM
Saturday, April 8, 1:00 PM
Contemporary Color is inspired by the phenomenon of color guard, colloquially known as “the sport of the arts”—conceived by David Byrne, co-commissioned by Brooklyn Academy of Music and Toronto’s Luminato Festival, and with support from WGI Sport of the Arts. Ten 20-40 person teams from the US and Canada performed at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center and Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, alongside an extraordinary array of musical talent—performing.
In David Byrne’s words:
Color guards are, well, high school (and college-level) “dance” groups who perform during half time at football games, and then compete amongst themselves later in the school year—usually in their school gymnasiums. They are, in my way of looking at them, a sophisticated folk art form that flies under the official cultural radar. They never get reviewed in the culture pages of the papers and most New Yorkers, I would wager, have never even heard or seen them (unless the New Yorkers grew up in one of the hundreds of towns where this culture thrives and evolves). I think it’s a wonderful, peculiar, under-appreciated and very creative art-form that deserves to be seen and experienced by a wider public.
This may be one of the few rockumentaries to tap the cinematic potential of sound and vision in a way that feels genuinely collaborative and borderline transcendental. -David Fear, Rolling Stone