JACKSON – For the past four days, music fans looking for a unique and eclectic mix have been in Jackson Hole for the first ever Contour Music Festival. The festival started on Thursday and will wrap up Sunday night.
From hip hop to electronic to rock, over 50 artists brought their unique sound to the festival. One group which will have event goers talking for months to come combined music, dancing, visual imagery and aerobatics.
Art that enchants, invigorates, and awakens the imagination has always been born of the rule breakers, and no one is breaking the rules more joyously, more fervently than Kansas City’s Quixotic.
Quixotic was founded in 2005 by renowned graphic designer, percussionist and artistic director Anthony Magliano. He was joined a year later by award-winning lighting and theater technology guru Mica Thomas. Quixotic’s mission was to tear down the walls that cloistered each discipline of the arts, unleashing a flood of new ideas that would wash away the staid norms of traditional theatre performance.
The melting pot of dance, aerial acrobatics, projection mapping, high fashion and original live music had fans on the edge of their chairs. It is the joint vision of Magliano and Thomas that has taken the loose collective of avant garde trendsetters and molded them into what the New York Times branded an “innovative circus [company].” This ultra-modern, multi-sensory experience shatters antiquated notions of “a night at the ballet.”
Dancers pushed the boundaries of athletic artistry while tribal electronica set the stage for the sixual panoply of color and agility in flight. Even the aural accompaniment blurs the lines between stylistic worlds, blending organic instrumentation of lush strings and primal drums with digital symphonies of programmed beats and bellowing subsonic frequencies.
The stunning and surreal environments that set the scene for this experimental movement troupe has aligned its performers with the most progressive acts in the electronic music scene. However, the undeniable grace, transcendent athleticism and dogmatic dedication to haute couture also allows Quixotic to flawlessly complement the Kansas City Symphony.
The raw power, immersive experience and sheer mesmerizing artistry of Quixotic Fusion cannot be conveyed through words, nor can audio or video alone capture the magic of an intense, firsthand glimpse of the collective in action. To truly get a sense of what it is to leave the earthly realm and enter a digital landscape of breathtaking wonder, where the bounds of genre—and gravity—have no meaning; you have to be there to believe.
