MOVED BY THE MOTION: SUDDEN RISE at the Whitney Museum

Sudden Rise is the New York City debut of Moved by the Motion, an ensemble formed in 2013 by recently named MacArthur Fellow Wu Tsang, interdisciplinary artist boychild, and collaborators including cellist Patrick Belaga, dancer Josh Johnson, electronic musician Asma Maroof, and poet and critic Fred Moten. Sudden Rise is a boundary-defying performance that draws on a collection of fragments excerpted from the text Sudden Rise at a Given Tune, co-written by Tsang, boychild, and Moten, to present a collage of words, film, movements, and sounds. Also interwoven are the language and actions of a number of pivotal twentieth-century civil rights activists, poets, and essayists, including Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and W.E.B. Du Bois, together with lyrics by Jimi Hendrix and musings by Hannah Arendt.