David Byrne, as a solo artist or with his former band The Talking Heads, was never a stranger to dance music. On the contrary. Byrne has come up with some excellent dance music, either ‘straight’ or ‘quirky.’
Now, he expresses his love of the genre through a project that he has been working on with Broadway set designer Christine Jones and choreographer Steven Hoggett called Social!, which is, as the British online publication Far Out Magazine calls it “a way to bring a gulp of socially distanced raving back to the parched New York masses.”
The new experimental club is at the Park Avenue Armory and will be able to host 100 attendees at a time. For the more shy dancers in attendance, there will be a choreography voiceover imparted by David Byrne himself.
The event’s soundtrack will be a playlist curated by Byrne, along with choice picks by Jones and Hoggett, all mixed together by DJ Natasha Diggs.
According to Rebecca Robertson, the Founding President and Executive Producer of Park Avenue Armory, “The commissioned work that is part of Social Distance Hall exists, not despite, but because of the pandemic that we have all been living through over the last year.”
“With Social!, we are delighted to invite New Yorkers to come together through a communal, safe, and multisensory experience that draws on the building’s acoustics and grand architecture, and the Armory’s cross-disciplinary programming mission.”
