Kara Walker performing in “Bleed,” by Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran, at the Whitney Museum on Friday.
The New York Times
By BEN RATLIFF
Published: May 14, 2012
Alicia Hall Moran is an operatic mezzo-soprano, and Jason Moran is a jazz pianist. They met at the Manhattan School of Music and
married in 2003. Since then they’ve made a lot of their work separately.
Mr. Moran has toured and recorded for 12 years with his trio, the
Bandwagon. Ms. Moran has performed as a singer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie
Zane Dance Company and is now the understudy to Audra McDonald in the
role of Bess in “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” on Broadway. But they
have worked together steadily, too, more than many people know.
From last Wednesday to Sunday on the fourth floor of the Whitney Museum
of American Art, from late morning to evening each day, the Morans
unspooled an extended collaboration, called “Bleed,” as a limited
residency that was part of the museum’s Biennial. (Ms. Moran left every
afternoon to report to the Richard Rodgers Theater, as she does six days
a week.)
“Bleed” was neither about jazz nor about opera, per se, though it
contained some of both, and much else: film, video, dance, poetry,
lecture, diary, journalism and alternative medicine. It offered 26
performances, including Ms. Moran’s doing a version of Beyoncé’s “Run
the World (Girls),” with Japanese taiko drummers, and singing operatic arrangements of Motown songs backed by harp, piano, guitar and percussion; a talk on “phenomenal listening” by the scholar Radiclani Clytus, who’s working on a film about the Morans; a series of voice-and-piano art songs dedicated to visual-artist
friends; an open rehearsal by the Bandwagon, with each musician miked so
the audience could hear the conversation; a solo-bass performance by
Esperanza Spalding; Charles Blow, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York
Times, reading a recent column he wrote on bullying; and Ms. Moran’s
receiving acupuncture while talking, sometimes tearfully, about why she
makes art. (“I’m looking for the story of me and you,” she said, supine,
both to the acupuncturist and by extension to everyone in the room.)
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