DescriptionPress

*Please note that the date for this show has been changed to Friday, June 26.*

A meditation on fate,
time,
and the outer contours of the human experience.

Loosely inspired by the Guinness Book of Records, The Measure of All Things weaves together a series of portraits of record-holding people, places, and things, including the tallest man (7 feet, 9 inches), the oldest living thing (5,000-year-old bristlecone pine in Southern California), the man struck by lightning the most times (seven!), the oldest living person (116), and the woman with the world’s longest name.

Academy Award nominated filmmaker Sam Green’s newest “live documentary” combines a film screening with in-person narration by the director and a soundtrack played live by the ensemble yMusic.

yMusic is a group of young performers who are actively engaged and equally comfortable in the overlapping classical and pop music worlds. Not only do its members regularly play with classical institutions like the New York Philharmonic and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, but they are active recitalists, arrangers, and commissioners, and have served key roles in touring and fulfilling indie rock visions from Sufjan Stevens to Bon Iver to The National. The group’s unique instrumentation includes a traditional string trio as well as the distinctive combination of flute, clarinet and trumpet. This exciting composite of sounds has sparked a burgeoning repertoire of commissions from some of today’s most important artists.

Sam Green’s film The Weather Underground was nominated for a 2004 Academy Award. FringeArts presented Green’s The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller in 2014. yMusic’s debut album, “Beautiful Mechanical,” was Time Out New York’s #1 Classical Record of 2011.

“Many of the records in Guinness seemed to be little poems or parables about the mysteries of being alive . . . an attempt to measure and catalog the outer edges of the human experience and through all that to make some sense of who we are.” Sam Green, director

 

---

Press

“The [live documentary] effect is something like Koyaanisqatsi filtered through an episode of This American Life.” Melena Ryzik, The New York Times

Produced by ArKtype and C41 Media.

 The Measure of All Things is in no way endorsed, sponsored, or connected to The Guinness Book of Records or Guinness World Records Limited.
Sam Green quote from an interview with Scott Macaulay in Filmmaker Magazine.

$25 / Students and 25-and-under $15 / Members save 30%

Buy Tickets