It was the hottest day of the year, and young musicians from the University of Michigan were staying cool in a 12th-century Benedictine cloister that, reconstructed indoors, let in the summer sun while a chill blew in from vents around their ankles.
But they wouldn’t be inside for long. Those players, from the University of Michigan Percussion Ensemble, were rehearsing “The Forest of Metal Objects,” which premieres on Friday and is designed to travel through the Met Cloisters, the hilltop museum of medieval art and architecture, with the performance ending outside in the lush garden of the Cuxa Cloister.
Before they went outdoors, though, the piece’s composer, Michael Gordon, had notes about how the percussionists were handling makeshift instruments constructed of small chains and jingle bells. “The first time you shake them, let’s make it playful,” he said. “But maybe the second time is about discovery, and then as we slow it down it becomes more serious.”
The players were also receiving direction from Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, founders of Big Dance Theater, who had choreographed each movement within the cloister, such as picking up the chains and processing to the next room, with some of them standing on steps to form a corridor for the audience.
Lazar didn’t know how many steps he could fill with performers without getting too close to the centuries-old sculptures at the top. “Does this work?” he asked a member of the museum’s curatorial staff who was observing. He was told to leave a couple of steps’ worth of space between the musicians and the art, and he happily obliged.
Such is the nature of site-specific performance. The creators of “The Forest of Metal Objects” have responded to the Cloisters as both an inspiration and a limitation, bringing modern, sometimes crude percussion instruments to a collection of priceless art and medieval buildings that were painstakingly transported from Europe and reconstructed in Upper Manhattan.
“It’s amazing,” Gordon said, “that they even let us through the door.”
Not just let in, but invited: “The Forest of Metal Objects,” which runs through Sunday, is a MetLiveArts commission, though it didn’t start as a museum-wide project. Gordon, a founder of the Bang on a Can music collective, said that he was asked whether he would be interested in writing something new for the Fuentidueña chapel. “And then I was like, ‘Well, could I do this?’ and ‘Could I do that?,’” he said. “And it grew as we started exploring what was possible.”
Gordon visited the museum repeatedly, testing out instruments and his collaborators: Parson and Lazar, who would choreograph and direct the show, incorporating text-based art by Todd Colby on banners and costumes, and featuring six dancer-actors; and Douglas Perkins, who would conduct 16 musicians from the University of Michigan Percussion Ensemble.
At the Cloisters, it can be difficult to tell where the museum collection ends and the 20th-century building that houses it begins. And through trial and error, under supervision from staff, they learned what was off limits: a stone floor here, a column or a bell there. (By now, Gordon said, “I know a lot about this place.”)
Some instruments were also better than others for the museum. Perkins worked with Gordon on another site-specific piece, “Field of Vision” (2022), and said that initially, they were expecting to use some of the same highly resonant metals at the Cloisters. “But we realized that this space doesn’t sound like that,” he said. “We had to bring in instruments that serve the place and resonate with the architecture itself.”
The space guided “Forest,” both its sound and its movement. After testing thunder sheets, chains and rebar, Gordon arrived at a chorus of flower pots for an introductory section of the piece, to be played along the staircase that leads from the museum’s entrance to the Main Hall upstairs. “They just go from high to low so that they’re not specifically tuned,” he said of the pots. “They’re untuned, but they’re harmonious. It almost sounds like heaven.”
Religion inspired Parson and Lazar’s movement as well. After all, it’s hard to avoid spirituality in galleries filled with crucifixes and scenes of biblical suffering. “It sent me to read a lot about Jesus,” Parson said, “and I started to think about all of us as sort of seekers.” She responded to the 16 cymbals of Gordon’s writing for the Fuentidueña gallery with “16 symbols,” which, as she found, happens to have a numerological connection with spiritual seeking.
The dancers will be entwined with the musicians throughout the performance, which begins with a prelude in the staircase and continues into the high Romanesque Hall before starting, officially, in the Fuentidueña chapel. There, the cymbals, hugging the walls, will surround audience members with stereophonic sound that travels around them with increasing speed, like particles in a collider.
Then the performers will walk to the indoor cloister, shaking their chains before guiding audience members through additional spaces until they reach the Cuxa Cloister for a 35-minute section in which the dancers act out a series of rituals, mysterious and mundane, while the musicians play an array of instruments that deliver rhythmic gestures on one side of the garden, and waves of sound on the other.
Gordon and Lazar went to Michigan to work with the musicians earlier this year to rehearse and test, Lazar said, “what sort of range of movement looked comfortable on them.” Each step of the performance, he added, was an opportunity for choreography. “When you face a staircase, you’re going to have to move a certain way,” he said. “And when you pick up a chain from a floor, every way you move is going to produce sound.”
The details were still being refined earlier this week inside the museum. Musicians were hearing how the instruments, some just pieces of scrap metal and cut rebar, sounded inside the cavernous rooms. Gordon said, “Half the instruments in here you can buy for about $25.” (Another money saver: using a silent-disco system to deliver a click track to the players.) One of the students, Anna Mueller, loved hearing a gong because, she said, “you feel it everywhere in your body.” The cymbals, though, had to be tamed so they didn’t overwhelm the space.
Museum security and staff looked on as the artists moved from room to room during rehearsal. Dancers, and eventually the musicians, wore Liv Rigdon’s costumes, which included black blazers decorated with Colby’s text on the back, phrases like “Is Quite Certain That Everything Feels a Little Off.” Someone described them as “memes, but stylish.”
By the time everyone reached the Cuxa Cloister, they performed, as Perkins said, “like a whole society.” Percussionists struck their instruments while dancers gathered around the pink Languedoc marble centerpiece and moved through a series of rituals like tossing a ball or eating a stick of celery. It’s a bit of daily life, “sort of nothing and everything,” Parson said, and a touch of levity that, with Colby’s art, counters the solemnity of the museum and Gordon’s music.
“Depending on the moment, it’s mundane,” Perkins said, “or it’s really profound.”
Joshua Barone is the assistant classical music and dance editor on the Culture Desk and a contributing classical music critic.
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