Solange: An Ode To
Solange at the Guggenheim (photo by Krisanne Johnson)

Solange performed high-concept piece 'An Ode To' @ The Guggenheim (pics, setlist)

One of the hottest tickets at this year’s Red Bull Music Academy was Solange: An Ode To, which took place at the Guggenheim Museum on Thursday (5/18) over two intimate performances. Conceived, arranged and choreographed by Solange Knowles, the performance “examined themes from her album A Seat At The Table through movement, installation, and experimentation with reconstructed musical arrangements.” It was fitting for the Guggenheim, with a full band and dancers that performed all over the museums’ many levels, and the audience was asked to wear white. The crowd included Zoe Kravitz, Björk, Questlove, Deray McKesson, the xx (in town for their own shows), Kelela, Le1f and Earl Sweatshirt. More from The New York Times:

Like the dress code, her choreography — for herself, two backup vocalists, six musicians and a core group of eight dancers — had an orderliness, anchored by simple geometric formations that echoed Kris Moran’s set of spherical and rectangular sculptures. Drawing our attention to the height and circularity of the space, a 13-member horn ensemble popped up on two levels of the museum’s spiral ramp, joined later by the dancers and 32 additional performers in a snaking descent toward the rotunda for a voluminous final section.

The core performers (who included some familiar faces from the modern dance world, like Kristen Foote of the Limón Dance Company and Davalois Fearon of the Stephen Petronio Company) often escalated from composed to wild, repeating the same movement with mounting energy. Folding forward became thrashing forward; swinging the arms became flinging the arms, the physical manifestation of lyrics like “you’ve got the right to be mad.”

Check out pictures from the event in the gallery above, and the setlist for the show is below.

Solange played Arizona’s FORM Arcosanti last weekend, and will be at Panorama Festival on Randalls Island in July. Her label Saint Heron also has a stage at Brooklyn’s Afropunk Fest in August.

SOLANGE: AN ODE TO – SET LIST
01 – Scales Intro
02 – Rise
03 – Weary
04 – Cranes in the Sky
05 – Cranes
06 – Don’t You Wait
07 – *New Mad*
08 – F.U.B.U.
09 – Black Maybe
10 – DTMH
11 – Rise

photos by Carys Huws, Krisanne Johnson, and Stacy Kranitz