Post-Talking Heads David Byrne has, beyond his purely musical projects, also been pretty unstoppable as far as his large-scale, often joyous experimentalism in live performance goes. He famously made the rock musical Here Lies Love with Fatboy Slim; he put together a William Onyeabor tribute tour (with Dev Hynes and Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, among many others); he now has a neuroscience-based immersive theater piece running in the Bay Area; he’s currently working on another musical — this one about Joan of Arc — with Here Lies Love director Alex Timbers; and perhaps most curiously, he took three years to, among other things, put together and play in a massive multidisciplinary series of performances devoted to color guard.
Today saw the release of a trailer for the documentary about those performances — Contemporary Color. (The doc shares its title with the spectacles themselves.) The two-minute preview for the film — by Bill and Turner Ross — features the 10 high school color guard teams featured in the shows and all of the featured composers musicians, such as St. Vincent, Dev Hynes, Nico Muhly, tUnE-yArDs, How to Dress Well, Nelly Furtado, Zola Jesus, and more. When Contemporary Color performed at the Barclay’s Center in 2015, Consequence of Sound wrote that it was “an elevation of the arts in expectations, possibilities, and all-around energy from every person involved.”
The film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year, will be out in limited release on March 1.
Watch the trailer: