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Artist Alex Da Corte Will Host Giant Karaoke Singalong in Times Square
It's your chance to belt it out on Broadway.
Sarah Cascone
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Alex Da Corte is ready to test your karaoke skills. To celebrate the start of his month-long midnight screening of his video, Blue Moon, the latest work in the ongoing Midnight Moment series from Times Square Arts, the artist will host a communal karaoke party in New York on February 1.
At 11:30 p.m., at the north end of Times Square, on 46th and Broadway in Duffy Square, a shivering public will be asked to sing the chorus of “Blue Moon,” the classic 1934 ballad written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.
“Could this be the world’s largest collective karaoke performance?” the event description wonders. (The Guinness Book of World Records reports that a 2009 sing-a-long to Garth Brooks’ hit, “Friends in Low Places,” at Bristol Motor Speedway in Bristol, Tennessee, is the current record, with 160,000 participants.)
“The karaoke stage is a perfect melting pot for the good and the bad singers of the world to be what they want to be or what they don’t want to be without recourse. It is a safe space,” said Da Corte, who readily admits he is a bad singer, in a statement. “I thought it apt to make a karaoke video for Time Square where the sound of the city would overpower any karaoke song of choice. It allows the performance to be without flaws, an ideal, an American idol… like watching someone land on the Moon.”
Alex Da Corte, Blue Moon (video still). Courtesy of Time Square Arts.
The song “Blue Moon” is the inspiration for Da Corte’s silent video piece, in which a singer in white-and-blue makeup holds a silver crescent, mouthing the words to the title song as the lyrics appear at the bottom of the screen. The work’s bright colors, splashed across nearly every billboard in Times Square, are meant to serve as an antidote to the winter blues, while the lyrics speak to universal longing.
“As our thoughts turn towards Valentine’s Day and the myriad and bizarre ways in which we express love, Alex Da Corte’s colorful, dreamlike film brings visitors to Times Square together in a moment of musing on loneliness and connection,” said Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, in statement.
Blue Moon is presented in partnership with New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, timed to the exhibition “Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016.” According to a statement from Whitney curator Chrissie Iles, the video’s costume and background “evokes the movie theaters and stages of Times Square from the 1930s to the 1950s, at the height of the musical’s popularity, transforming cinematic spectacle into an intimate collective experience.”
Throughout the rest of the month, Blue Moon will play nightly from 11:57 p.m. to midnight.
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