EMMANUEL VUKOVICH

Inspired by the cross-cultural legacy of Béla Bartók’s research of peasant & folk music traditions from over 100 years ago, RESILIENCE Project - In Movement is a ground-breaking world-premiere collaboration between Canadian violinist Emmanuel Vukovic and internationally renowned Central South American Flex Prodigy Storyboard P under the artistic direction of celebrated American dance maker Richard Colton. The project features the danced performance of Bartok’s monumental Sonata for Solo Violin. 

"As a performance-goer in New York since the 1980s and a newspaper reviewer for most of that time, I felt that Emmanuel Vukovich and Storyboard P's collaboration via Bartok's solo violin sonata--which I saw in a very early, workshopped form at Barnard College in June, 2024--was exactly the kind of thing I want to see more of.   Here I run into a problem in communicating my enthusiasm for it, because to say "exactly the kind of thing," etc., is to imply that it already exists within a category, that it conforms to a pre-existing standard and can be rendered well or badly according to that standard.  Part of the strength of this performance was that it was so out of the box, so open and unprogrammed and full of possibility, so impossible to get conclusively "right,"  that the audience had plenty of room for figuring it out themselves: this piece could actually push forward an audience's understanding of Bartok/street dance/sonic motion/body motion, all at the same time, rather than just reconfirming what we already know.  (This piece implies that it doesn't care what you already know, and does so without aggression or provocation.)  Vukovich with a blue-chip avant-garde or "modern" dancer would be great, but expected.  Storyboard with music from the hip-hop continuum: great but expected.  Nearly all art in the marketplace, no matter how new or reckless, lives within depressingly categorized limits.  But to me music is understood most deeply as motion, and motion transcends the safety of tradition or style or genre; to focus on motion opens great possibilities for fighting category.  The most distinct and consequential performance projects of the future, the ones with the true zap, will be vigorous about de-categorizing, and Richard Colton's brilliant dance-and-music projects have that vigor.  More, please."  July 2024

Ben Ratliff, New York Times music critic

benratliff.net