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(Image credit: Jessica Bartolini)<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
And that fed directly into your choreography?<\/strong><\/p>\nI thought: this is a great opportunity to show 13 people who all move all at once. Everybody gets their responsibility. Everybody is somebody you will know by the end of the show. Also: let\u2019s not to forget that we’re going to be doing this with a load of people that are willfully [committed]. [As an audience] we’re all looking the same way because we want to join something.<\/p>\n\n\n
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(Image credit: Jessica Bartolini)<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
There is unity in unity\u2026 <\/strong><\/p>\nI’ve always felt that when people start moving in unison on a dancefloor or wherever, I drop my shopping. It’s one of the most amazing things that people can do. Whether involuntarily or not. I wasn’t old enough for this, but I remember in the \u201970s, there was lots of dance routines that people always used to do with the same movements on a dancefloor. That had gone by the \u201980s when I got into a nightclub. I am kind of sad about that. But, yeah, bodies moving in unison always makes me feel good. It’s my sweet spot.<\/p>\n
How did you go about choreographing a bunch of people with a range of dance skills and abilities?<\/strong><\/p>\nWe had six weeks rehearsal in New York last summer. I didn’t put a number together for three weeks. In the mornings, I worked with the dancers. I didn’t use David Byrne tracks. I used different music by different artists, and I tried some ideas out. I didn’t want them to know that it was going to be, say, \u2018Slippery People\u2019, because they’d give me an obvious result.<\/p>\n
So I would give him a task, and it might be something like: \u201cYou are a futuristic disco dancer\u2026” Or we watched some nature programmes. There’s a beautiful flamingo sequence in Blue Planet<\/em> that we watched. We watched Dumbo<\/em>. We watched Madonna’s \u2018Frozen\u2019 video by Chris Cunningham.<\/p>\n\n\n
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(Image credit: Jessica Bartolini)<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
What about the musicians?<\/strong><\/p>\nIn the afternoons, I watched them all learn to play the songs. I’m looking as they’re looking down at the fretboard, seeing where their hips and shoulders and fingers and elbows are. So which way can they go? Which way can’t they go? And I held my nerve for three weeks, because then we had two weeks to choreograph all 23 songs. So it’s six days a week. I don’t know how we did it, but in the last week we ran the whole thing. It was manic and mad. But I felt that by sitting back and not panicking and doing my homework, it fed me lots of ideas.<\/p>\n
What does David see that’s important about the choreography in terms of amplifying the messages of his songs?<\/strong><\/p>\nI’ll put it really simply: David loves dancing. And like anything, his dancing has changed. It’s easy to prep for this show because there lots of footage of David. It’s amazing to watch him go from his hips and his knees, and now it’s his shoulders and his hands where his choreography sits. I love the fact that he’s grown up through his body. And now as a physical, kinetic being, he lives and sits somewhere entirely different. He doesn’t move at all like he did in Stop Making Sense<\/em>. That’s because we develop \u2013 our intrinsic sense of movement changes over time. And his has. But he just loves dancing.<\/p>\nAnd to explore [those ideas] in the way they did with American Utopia<\/em> was breathtaking. Any choreographer [would agree]. The place was packed with choreographers when I saw it. You couldn’t move for us. Everybody had their notebooks out. Like: \u201cWhat the fuck?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n
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(Image credit: Jessica Bartolini)<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
Having worked with Thom Yorke, as a choreographer how would you characterise the Radiohead frontman\u2019s dancing style?<\/strong><\/p>\nWooargh<\/em>… Synaptic… seizure. Frenetic. We were actually all together yesterday, because we’re bringing that back this year in London, and we were talking about choreography. He’s another person who really knows his dance.<\/p>\nHow was it co-creating the <\/strong>Hamlet\/Hail to the Thief<\/strong><\/em> piece?<\/strong><\/p>\nActually, we had a challenging workshop developing Hamlet<\/em>. It was the last day, and Thom came over. He just looked a little bit cowed and quiet. He went: \u201cI don’t really know how to say this to you… but I didn’t like any of the choreography these last two weeks.\u201d And I was like: he’s right<\/em>. It wasn’t very good. I mean, I was absolutely mortified and terrified! But I love the fact that he wouldn’t purport to know much but he does have taste. And it matters to him what choreography does.<\/p>\nThat was a big lesson to me, which was: [these musicians] are looking and they’re watching, and they do know what they want. So I don’t waste anybody’s time anymore! When it comes to choreography, you’ve got to be able to put it up, and you’ve got to stand by it. But it was one of the worst moments of my life!<\/p>\n\n\n
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(Image credit: Jessica Bartolini)<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
To end on a sidenote: you mentioned the room at one of the <\/strong>American Utopia<\/strong><\/em> shows as being full of choreographers. What\u2019s the collective noun for a group of choreographers?<\/strong><\/p>\nA… I was about to use a swear word! Well, either in New York or London, if you put a big group of choreographers in a room together, they’d have a great night. Directors, they wouldn’t even speak to each other \u2013 they’d pretend they didn’t know each other. That is true. So: a drunk of choreographers. Because they get hammered if they can slip the leash.<\/p>\n
The UK leg of <\/em>David Byrne\u2019s Who Is the Sky? tour<\/em><\/a> starts this week <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n
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(Image credit: Jessica Bartolini)<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.wallpaper.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With his American Utopia show, David Byrne changed what the rock(ish) concert could be. No singer at the front and drummer stuck at the back. No guitarists and keyboards dutifully flanking the frontman, the backing vocalists corralled on a platform. No rigidity. The use of the latest in wireless technology meant he and his snappily […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2308481,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2308480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/David-Byrnes-Who-Is-The-Sky-tour-an-interview-with.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2308480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2308480"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2308480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2308482,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2308480\/revisions\/2308482"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2308481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2308480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2308480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2308480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}