The Lafayette musician, artist, and hipster extraordinaire has been living overseas for the past month... If you haven't seen Dickie Landry bouncing around downtown Lafayette lately it's because the dude is in Taipei, Taiwan, of all places. The Lafayette musician, artist, and hipster extraordinaire has been living overseas for the past month playing one of the characters in American stage director Robert Wilson's production of 1433 The Grand Voyage, now being staged in conjunction with Taiwan's U-Theatre.
If you're unfamiliar with Robert Wilson, he is considered one of the vanguards of American avant-garde theater. Most famously, he collaborated with Phillip Glass in Einstein on the Beach. Other collaborators include William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Waits, and David Byrne. In short, almost everything he has touched has been challenging and pretty impressive.
Reviews of the show have been overwhelmingly good with critics raving about Landry's onstage work with Taiwanese diva Tang Mei-yun where the two duet Landry improvising jazz licks on saxophone while Tang Mei-yun follows him vocally in an improvisational journey repeated nightly in varying forms and yielding theatrically appropriate results.
1433 The Grand Voyage is being staged as part of the 2010 Taiwan International Festival.
To learn more about Dickie Landry and his numerous contributions to American music, from swamp pop to the avant garde, you can listen to a recent interview with him here at the syndicated radio show Amercan Routes.