Performa is throwing down. Friday night’s Text of Light was dynamic curation at its most inspiring. Curators Lana Wilson and Esa Nickle worked with Friends of the High Line to screen two “city symphony” films from the 1930s set to original music. The location was the High Line Park underneath where the Standard Hotel straddles the 1930s elevated west side railroad. Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first Italian Futurist manifesto, both films, Manhatta (1921)by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) by Walter Ruttmann, are montages in documentary style with preoccupations for labor, industrialization, urbanization, transportation, and speed. Manhatta was inspired by Walt Whitman’s poem of the same title. Berlin was set to improvisational music by the ensemble Text of Light (Ulrich Krieger, Alan Licht, Christian Marclay, and Lee Ranaldo). Specially constructed by Performa for this performance was the futurist instrument the intonarumori that Text of Light played.

Screening these two films with images of railroads, steam, scaffolding, images of the development of modernity, societies’ negotiations of the modern city and the transitory development brought about by this time period on the High Line, a relic from that era, contextualized and activated the films, the music, and the whole setting.