![]() I sensed something moving near my face and as my eyes adjusted I began to make out a dancer writhing in slow motion, his arms stirring the air around me. A hand touched my elbow and led me into the center of the room. Unaccompanied voices fluttered in the total darkness, quietly singing, trilling, and laying down a percussive beat of crunches and clicks. Mastering my claustrophobia, I stepped into the blacked-out, superheated interior, where an installation by Tino Sehgal was underway. Sweaty people were resting on the high-backed upholstered benches that line the building’s exterior. There, the architect Kunlé Adeyemi, who once designed a solar-powered floating school for his flood-prone native Nigeria, has erected a temporary pavilion with no windows and movable walls. I stopped by on an eerily warm afternoon, when the glass towers along Tenth Avenue focused the heat and glare and noise onto the plaza at West 31st Street like a noxious ray gun. And so he produced the artistic equivalent of a variety pack, in which you never quite know what you’re going to get. “I didn’t want to open up New York’s first major new arts center in decades and have people say What is that?” artistic director Alex Poots told me. To give a little body to these lofty abstractions, A Prelude to the Shed is running until May 13 in a temporary, um, shed across from the construction site. It’s not just a rental hall but an engine for the creation of new work, with free events, an open-call talent search, and a cache of $5 tickets for each of the paid shows. (Naturally, Quincy Jones is involved.) Chen Shi-Zheng, who directed The Peony Pavilion at Lincoln Center, is putting together Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise, a spectacular dance-heavy retelling of “a Chinese myth about a sect in Queens that holds the power to extend human life.” (Who knew there were Chinese myths about Queens?) The Shed has declared itself a home for artists in all forms, popular and avant-garde, legendary and obscure, intimate and immense. Steve McQueen, the director and producer of 12 Years a Slave, came up with the idea of a multi-concert saga of African-American music, starting with its origins in slavery. ![]() The first major commissions are in place, and the menu reads like a list of buzzwords (“immersive,” “multimedia,” “site-specific”), elaborate concepts, and a credit roll of prestigious names. In a mere five minutes, using only the horsepower of your average Prius, the whole outer shell, trusses and all, can roll out to create a huge antechamber for the biggest performances, or roll back to free up a plaza in front of the building, which is emblazoned with the Shed’s first commission, a piece called “In Front of Itself.” Created by the artist Lawrence Weiner, it consists simply of the titular phrase set into the paving stones in 12-foot letters.A year before its opening, the Shed, the bubble-wrapped, steel-ribbed arts complex nearing completion at Hudson Yards, remains fuzzed in mystery. (That’s the high-rise that the Shed’s “train car” backs into.) Around the whole building is a skin that looks solid and silvery from the outside, but from within turns out to be a patchwork of translucent pillowy shields, supported by a frame of giant steel trusses manufactured in Italy. There are four floors of exhibition and performance space in a fixed, glass-walled portion of the building, the back of which makes use of the footprint of 15 Hudson Yards, an adjacent residential tower designed by the same architects. The Shed embraces plenty of buzzwords of 21st-century art and design: flexibility, versatility, inclusivity.
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