Big Bird Sets Up Nest On The Met’s Roof!

Nearly 40 years after being locked in the The Metropolitan Museum of Art overnight, Big Bird has a new home atop the iconic museum.

Last night The Met unveiled it's 2021 rooftop garden sculpture featuring a very blue Big Bird. 

As Long as the Sun Lasts is a 26-foot-tall kinetic sculpture featuring Sesame Street's Big Bird and the modern aesthetic of Alexander Calder’s standing mobiles.

The museum selected Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte to create the site-specific installation.

The sculpture involves a base with three interlocking features, along with a mobile Big Bird piece sitting on a crescent moon that sways in the wind. 

Follow That Bird's "The Blue Bird of Happiness" 

The character is colored blue instead of yellow, because of his “melancholic disposition” and as an homage to the Brazilian version of Sesame Street that De Corte grew up with, where Big Bird’s counterpart Garibaldo was blue and surprisingly, not as an homage to Big Bird as the "Blue Bird of Happiness" from Follow That Bird.

The Big Bird sculpture is made of about 7,000 individually placed laser-cut aluminum feathers.

A press release reveled that he’s holding a ladder, “suggesting the possibility of passage back to Earth or to other galaxies."

“Alex Da Corte’s bold work for the Cantor Roof Garden oscillates between joy and melancholy, and brings a playful message of optimism and reflection,” Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director of The Met said.

“The installation, which the artist initiated just as the pandemic was taking hold, invites us to look through a familiar, popular, modern lens at our own condition in a transformed emotional landscape. As the sculpture gently rotates in the wind, it calls us in an assuring way to pause and reflect: We are reminded that stability is an illusion, but ultimately what we see is a statement of belief in the potential of transformation.”

About the artist:
(From The Met)

Alex Da Corte (American, born 1980) has been commissioned to create a site-specific installation for The Met’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. The Roof Garden Commission: Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts will be on view from April 16 through October 31, 2021. It is the ninth in a series of site-specific commissions for the outdoor space

Alex Da Corte was born in Camden, New Jersey, and lives and works in Philadelphia. After training as an animator at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, he received a BFA in Printmaking/Fine Arts from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and an MFA from Yale University. Working across a range of media including film, performance, painting, installation, and sculpture, Da Corte’s practice is invested in deconstructing and reinventing those objects and cultural icons that are not only familiar and beloved, but also contested. His work was included in the 2019 Venice Biennale and the 2018 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. Museums that have mounted solo exhibitions include the Prada Rong Zhai (2020), Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne (2018), Secession in Vienna (2017), MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts (2016), and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (2015). In March 2020, Da Corte reinvented Allan Kaprow’s performance Chicken (1962) as part of Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-Garde.

"As Long as the Sun Lasts" is on view from April 16 through October 31, 2021 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. 

RIP Dame Gillian Lynne, Muppet Show Choreographer.

Dame Gillian Lynne, who served as the choreographer on The Muppet Show on at least 17 episodes has died.

According to IMDB, Lynne choreographed the following episodes of The Muppet Show:

• Joel Grey 
• Rita Moreno 
• Kaye Ballard
• Nancy Walker
• Don Knotts
• Petula Clark
• Leo Sayer 
• Gilda Radner
• Liberace 
• Alice Cooper
• Marisa Berenson 
• Lesley Ann Warren 
• Spike Milligan
• Leslie Uggams
• Jonathan Winters 
• Diana Ross 
• Melissa Manchester  

Check out a few sample of her work below: 

In addition to her work on The Muppet Show, Lynne also worked on the Sesame Street specials Don't Eat the Pictures: Sesame Street at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and 

Big Bird's Birthday or Let Me Eat Cake.

She is perhaps best know though for her work on the stage productions of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats and The Phantom of the Opera.

At age 87, Lynne was made a DBE (Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2014 New Year Honours List.

She has won, and been nominated for, numerous awards for her work. She has received the Silver Order of Merit, Golden Rose of Montreux Award, BAFTA, Molière Award and The Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award by the Royal Academy of Dance (2001). She received a Special Award at the 2013 Olivier Awards.

She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1997 Birthday Honours and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to dance and musical theatre.

Lynne was nominated for the Tony Award twice for Choreography, for Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, and for the Drama Desk Award for Cats. She received the Olivier Award in 1981, for Outstanding Achievement of the Year in Musicals, for Cats.

Just this year The New London Theatre was renamed the Gillian Lynne Theatre, making it the first theatre in the West End of London to be named after a non-royal woman. 

She was 92.