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First concert, then movie: much mileage from the Barclays Center's one collaboration with BAM

The Barclays Center has gotten a lot of mileage out of its first and only collaboration over four-plus years with the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which was hyped in 2011 as "three or four shows a year."

On 1/21/15, I previewed the "Contemporary Color" collaboration, scheduled for June of that year, organized by David Byrne and featuring various color guard teams with an array of musicians.

Now there's a film, "Contemporary Color." The New York Times review suggests this film "could have used" the "focus and commitment coherence" of the Talking Heads (featuring Byrne) 1984 concert film “Stop Making Sense.”

By contrast, Rolling Stone's review is a rave, suggesting, "This may be one of the few rockumentaries since 'Stop Making Sense' to tap the cinematic potential of sound and vision in a way that feels genuinely collaborative and borderline transcendental." From the review:
Byrne set out to show the artistic bona fides behind such heartland pageantry, and the filmmakers up the ante by making kids who "aren't exactly prom kings and queens" seem leagues cooler than the Williamsburg-approved artists scoring their interpretive boogies. Even without the movie's lingering shot of the White House lit up in rainbow colors on TV, you sense how the movie positions the event as an outsider reclamation for the participants of this subculture. Back home, these kids might be considered betas by small-town jocks and snooty froshes. Contemporary Color turns them into next-gen Bowies. Even the rock stars bow down.

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