ALVIN AILEY DISCO INFERNO
Studio 54 at the Brooklyn Museum
If dancing through an empty museum isn’t on your bucket list yet, we guarantee it will be after watching this joyful video of the Ailey II dance troupe strutting their stuff through the Brooklyn Museum. And lest you wonder, no social distancing laws were broken in its making, as it was shot before the museum closed its doors.
Starting in the museum’s Studio 54: Night Music exhibition, lead dancer Caroline Theodora Dartey, her upper torso painted in glittering silver, boogies through galleries lined with paintings and sculptures to the disco classic “Disco Inferno” by the Trammps. As she passes museum “visitors” gazing at art, they spontaneously join in on the action and follow her lead, wending through the corridors and ending up in the grand Beaux-Arts Court, a remarkable space that has been used for dozens of fashion shows and film shoots (“Master of None” fans might recognize it from the Season 2 episode “The Dinner Party”).
Directed by Redha Medjellekh, a recent subject of the New York Times’s “How They Spend Their Sundays” feature, the video is an exhilarating two-minute masterclass in blocking, spacing and choreography, not to mention use of space.
Made to commemorate the April 26, 1977 opening of Studio 54, at which the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater performed, the video was shot after-hours in the empty museum. “There was glitter all over the floor when we came to work Monday morning,” Matthew Yokobosky, Brooklyn Museum’s Senior Curator of Fashion and Material Culture and curator of the exhibition tells PROVOKR. Studio 54: Night Music, which features photography, film, fashion, set designs, drawings and costume illustrations, opened on March 13 and was slated to run through July 5. Unfortunate timing for sure, but Yokobosky is hopeful that the show will be extended when the museum reopens.
(Fun fact: The gentleman who boards the dance train at the 55-second mark is an employee of the museum).
