Park Avenue Armory Adds Performance of OKTOPHONIE, 3/24

Due to overwhelming demand, Park Avenue Armory announced today that it has added one additional performance, on Sunday, March 24 at 4pm, of Karlheinz Stockhausen's OKTOPHONIE to its schedule. Part of Stockhausen's magnum opus "Licht" (or "Light") OKTOPHONIE is a trailblazing electronic music experience where the audience is surrounded by eight groups of loudspeakers, enveloping them in a sonic environment. The Armory had originally scheduled six performances of the work, then added two others when the first six almost immediately sold out. The addition of the performance on March 24 at 4pm brings the total to nine performances. The eight other performances of OKTOPHONIE are completely sold out.

OKTOPHONIE, which will be performed by one of Stockhausen's original collaborators Kathinka Pasveer, exemplifies Stockhausen's work as a compositional pioneer who grappled with spatial music as he bent the rules and redefined the listening experience. Staging the work as the composer originally intended-in outer space-Rirkrit Tiravanija has been commissioned by the Armory to create a ritualized lunar experience, a floating seating installation within the Armory's soaring drill hall that heightens the listeners' octophonic experience and transports them to another realm. The audience will Don White cloaks for the journey, carried along by the all-encompassing score, itself a meditation on the transformation from plunging darkness into blinding light.

The Armory's 2013 season also includes WS, a monumental installation by Paul McCarthy; The Machine, a play by Matt Charman, that chronicles Garry Kasparov's 1997 chess game against IBM's Deep Blue super-computer that set man against machine; Massive Attack V Adam Curtis, a new kind of imaginative experience conceived by Adam Curtis and Robert Del Naja mixing music, film, politics, and moments of illusion, performed by Massive Attack and special guests; and Robert Wilson's powerful new staging of The Life and Death of Marina Abramovi?.

More information on Park Avenue Armory's 2013 artistic season may be found at www.armoryonpark.org.