<p>Phenomenal Listening from tony gannon on Vimeo.</p>

Art, Ancestry, Africa:

Letting It All Bleed

Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Kara Walker performing in “Bleed,” by Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran, at the Whitney Museum on Friday. More Photos »

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: May 14, 2012

<p>BLEED DAY 1 - Alicia Hall Moran & Jason Moran from tony gannon on Vimeo.</p>

<p>BLEED BREAKDOWN from tony gannon on Vimeo.</p>

Alicia Hall Moran is an operatic mezzo-soprano, and Jason Moran is a jazz pianist. They met at the Manhattan School of Music and married in 2003. Since then they’ve made a lot of their work separately. Mr. Moran has toured and recorded for 12 years with his trio, the Bandwagon. Ms. Moran has performed as a singer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and is now the understudy to Audra McDonald in the role of Bess in “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” on Broadway. But they have worked together steadily, too, more than many people know.

From last Wednesday to Sunday on the fourth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art, from late morning to evening each day, the Morans unspooled an extended collaboration, called “Bleed,” as a limited residency that was part of the museum’s Biennial. (Ms. Moran left every afternoon to report to the Richard Rodgers Theater, as she does six days a week.)

“Bleed” was neither about jazz nor about opera, per se, though it contained some of both, and much else: film, video, dance, poetry, lecture, diary, journalism and alternative medicine. It offered 26 performances, including Ms. Moran’s doing a version of Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls),” with Japanese taiko drummers, and singing operatic arrangements of Motown songs backed by harp, piano, guitar and percussion; a talk on “phenomenal listening” by the scholar Radiclani Clytus, who’s working on a film about the Morans; a series of voice-and-piano art songs dedicated to visual-artist friends; an open rehearsal by the Bandwagon, with each musician miked so the audience could hear the conversation; a solo-bass performance by Esperanza Spalding; Charles Blow, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, reading a recent column he wrote on bullying; and Ms. Moran’s receiving acupuncture while talking, sometimes tearfully, about why she makes art. (“I’m looking for the story of me and you,” she said, supine, both to the acupuncturist and by extension to everyone in the room.)

The Morans didn’t write a mission statement for the residency, and when asked during a break one afternoon to sum it up, they both said more or less the same thing: They wouldn’t know how to. Instead they talked about their relationships with their friends. This wasn’t a didactic exercise. They have strong intuition, but they don’t overinterpret themselves.

So I’ll try. “Bleed” was pretty extraordinary in breadth, depth, planning and execution; if you’d seen the Morans only as imposing musicians, it’s time to expand that view. I went four days out of five, and though I’ve followed their work for 15 years or so, I found a lot more to understand.

The work operated on three interrelated levels. One was the basic stuff of postmodern art: exploding genre and format, breaking down the fourth wall, making the private public, exposing process and the self. Another was the meaning and possibility of collaboration — primarily Mr. and Ms. Moran’s, but also many others branching off the main link.

“We’re collaborating with other artists, but we’re also collaborating with the people running the lights and microphones here,” Mr. Moran explained between performances to a group of Brooklyn high school students on Wednesday. “You collaborate with your family too. You and your mother is the biggest collaboration you’ll ever have.”

The third level: family, community and ancestry. Parents, children, friends, colleagues, diaspora. That’s a lot of linking, and it might have led to glibness in the artists and fatigue in the viewer — a what-is-this-project-not-about feeling — if the Morans hadn’t presented all those links as necessary for the survival of culture. A short film by the critic Maurice Berger, “Threshold,” showing in the corner of the room, strung together clips from movies and television shows of African-Americans beginning various journeys, passages or challenges: Diana Ross and Michael Jackson on the yellow brick road in “The Wiz”; dancers on “Soul Train”; Denzel Washington as Malcolm X stepping up to a podium. The mood of that film carried through the whole week: moving forward, crossing lines, evolving.

“Bleed” wasn’t all about black art, but when it was, it was deeply so — especially on Sunday, with a triple-header of new-world Africana. At 11:30 that morning came a pretty stunning hourlong suite by the Bandwagon, with Ms. Moran and the guitarist Bill Frisell, called “Live:Time,” first performed in 2008 and inspired by the Gee’s Bend quilters from southern Alabama. (It also contained readings from Asali Solomon’s story “Cold Water for Blood Stains” and a letter by Mr. Frisell to Mr. Moran — read by Mr. Frisell between solos — on how to find the quilters when you arrive in their town.)

It was a work of coordinated themes often leading to a kind of trance music: somewhere among Miles Davis’s “In a Silent Way,” the Grateful Dead’s second-set jams in the early ’70s, the polyphony in slow gospel hymns and the most volatile parts of Mr. Moran’s own club gigs. That was something I won’t forget.

Likewise with “Rain,” a piece from 2005 that was inspired by ring shouts and blues, in which the trumpeter Ralph Alessi walked in a circle around the audience, playing a melodic line developed by the Senegalese kora player Abdou M’Boup. And the same again with the closing performance of the day and week, “Run, Mary, Run,” a piece by the choreographer Rashida Bumbray and Dance Diaspora Collective, with several percussionists and Mr. Moran on piano.

“Run” also draws on the ring shouts and circle dances that came to the southern United States from West Africa. To a steady rhythm more than a dozen dancers moved and sang in call-and-response patterns — both old chants and lines from Parliament’s “Mothership Connection.”

I’ll also never forget Karaoke Walkrrr, the stage persona of Kara Walker, a MacArthur fellow like Mr. Moran and a visual artist best known for her paper silhouettes of images from America’s racist past: slaves and masters, power, sex and cruelty. (She had a film installation in another corner of the room, using those silhouettes as puppets in a drama, scored by Mr. Moran’s solo piano.)

On Saturday night, in shorts and a baseball cap, she joined Bandwagon for a performance called “Improvisation With Mutually Assured Destruction,” reading a text of jarring and violent words: the sex-race-power themes in another medium. Then she clicked a button on her laptop and out came “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones, which Bandwagon played along with, strictly at first, then pushing against it, making a general disturbance.

Ms. Walker had composed a video backdrop for the occasion: quick, strobing images of Mick Jagger and words and phrases from the song — suggesting, either vaguely or directly, slavery, rape and heroin — and her own words and phrases: “slit,” “blood,” “smoke,” “stuck,” “crawl,” “beg,” “grovel.” She’s no kind of singer, but it didn’t matter. The piece was short and powerful and disturbing, a kind of head-exploding multimedia essay, and the Morans had built the right place for it to happen.