Last week in Dallas, Ryan McNamara presented a performance in the form of a gently vandalized press conference. The setting was the city’s I.M. Pei-designed Meyerson Symphony Center, and the occasion was the official announcement of Soluna, a three-week art-and-music festival centered around the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and slated for May of 2015. Like most press conferences, this one started out with some basic welcoming remarks, in this case from the symphony’s president and CEO, Jonathan Martin, who laid out Soluna’s rather broad thematic (“Destination (America)”) and described Dallas as a “microcosm of America’s emerging and future face.” He mentioned a question that constantly preoccupies him and his colleagues: “Where is classical music headed, and how do we as an orchestra maintain its relevance, both here in Dallas, and in society? We believe that one of the catalysts to ensure a future for art and music, and a future audience, lies in the cross-pollination of genres and talent.”
Martin was followed by Anna-Sophia van Zweden, the director of festival advancement for Soluna (and the daughter of Dallas Symphony Orchestra conductor Jaap van Zweden). Two confirmed components of the event, she said, are a new commission from Pipilloti Rist, and an evening that combines videos by Yael Bartana with the music of Leonard Bernstein’s “Kaddish.” Everything seemed fairly normal until the sound of orchestral instruments in the distance started making it more than a little hard to hear van Zweden’s description of the festival’s partnerships and sponsorships. The cause of that disturbance soon materialized — in the form of jumpsuit-wearing strangers pushing trolleys bearing various orchestra members, playing a hybrid classical composition as they were wheeled in a circle around the assembled visitors, journalists, and collectors in town for the Dallas Art Fair. Van Zweden kept talking throughout, her voice a low and indecipherable murmur beneath the symphony’s elegant soundtrack.
If only all media events were so concise, and interrupted by live music before boredom sets in! “Everyone hates a long press conference,” McNamara told me after the event. He’d been tapped to organize the day’s performance and jumped at the opportunity to work with an actual orchestra — normally a prohibitively expensive proposition, he says. The trolley-pushers were local Dallas actors, since McNamara was seeking “someone who can inhabit that slower pace, [which] is actually a skill,” not to mention the appropriate “stoic gaze” whilst pushing. Their jumpsuits were inspired by the colors of Ellsworth Kelly’s “Dallas Panels (Blue Green Black Red),” a massive work that hangs in the lobby of the Meyerson Symphony Center. “Next time we’re going to get a perfect Ellsworth Kelly Green,” McNamara said, since the jumpsuit version was admittedly more of a sea-foam.
The artist, who recently was awarded the Malcolm McLaren Award for his work in Performa 13, hopes to take part in Soluna himself, though he’s still sorting out the scheduling. Van Zweden notes that Soluna will sprawl throughout Dallas and will incorporate many of the local art institutions, like the Goss-Michael Foundation and Dallas Contemporary. “We’re looking into doing a lot of work in the public space,” she told me. “We have the ability to work with the chamber orchestras, so we’ll have little concerts throughout the city. It’s a big experiment.”
