Commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory as an installation and experience in that amazing vast space.
July 24, 2015, I weighed the option of spending $13 to sit in the dark to watch some easy-to-anticipate blockbuster movie for 2 hours, or spend $15 for entry of an unknown length of time inside a cryptically evolving space which Pareno (or Philippe if he prefers) calls a "mental choreography".
My 3 hour experience in this constantly adjusting visuacoustic hall was just brilliant. During a weekday the crowds were few, but it was immediately interesting to feel that somehow this place would be brilliant when crowded - odd since I really do not prefer being stuck indoors with loads of people.
Automated pianos, harsh shadows, sudden shifts of the entire hall from daylight to darkness, the sounds of movie screens being hoisted and lowered so that the holding straps are percussive, ghostly representations of marquees, a series of movies which oppose fast action and yet grab attention entirely. And a truly fascinating concept (as a father of acting children) of kids speaking quietly to the crowd as the embodied dimensional representation of a manga character making observations about human life and asking some impossible questions.
At one point a crowd of school kids came in and clambered up the circular moving Bleachers and sat, or lay down, next to me while the recreation of Marilyn describes the Waldorf Astoria room she might have inhabited. It is not clear if the kids knew who the movie was about since the computerized handwriting revealed the name Norma Jean, but they all very quickly began to refer to the film as creepy. There is certainly something, not-quite-straightforward about the images and while creepy was a good word to use, it did not creep them out so much that they left. They continued to watch; perhaps that which is creepy is also a fascination?