BAM Blog Questionnaire: It Takes a Village

Steel Hammer—coming to the BAM Harvey Theater this Wednesday, December 2—creatively explores the cost of hard labor on the human body and soul. We spoke with four individuals involved in this collaboration—two singers, a stage manager, and two playwrights—to better understand the process involved in creating this multi-hyphenate work of new music theater.

Steel Hammer. Photo: Krannert Center

How did you get involved with Steel Hammer? What is your contribution to the piece?

KATIE GEISSINGER (singer): I'd seen the concert Steel Hammer at Zankel Hall with Trio Mediaeval in 2009, and was longing to sing it. When Julia Wolfe called because she was casting a local trio, I jumped!

CARL HANCOCK RUX (playwright): Anne Bogart (and SITI Company) contacted me and asked if I'd be interested in writing text for a new piece she was working on based on the John Henry myth. I'd long been a fan of Anne Bogart and Julia Wolfe and was thrilled to accept the invitation. I wrote the "Migrant Mamie Remembers" monologue performed by Patrice Johnson Chevannes.

ELLEN MEZZERA (stage manager): I joined Steel Hammer a few weeks before we went to Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2014 as the production stage manager.

KIA CORTHRON (playwright): Anne Bogart contacted me by email. I think we may have met in passing before that, but never formally. She asked me to be one of the contributing writers.

EMILY EAGEN (singer): I remember first discussing the piece with Julia Wolfe on the phone, and, when she described the connections the work makes between folk music and contemporary music, I got so excited! I can still remember that exact moment.

So Many John Henrys

Photo: Michael Brosilow

By Robert Jackson Wood

It’s been said that you can never sing a folk song twice. Folk songs are living organisms, the argument goes, not reproducible objects, existing to perpetually renew the contract between universal myths and the gritty particulars of our lives. Sometimes, because songs migrate and the oral tradition gets creative, those particulars work their way into the songs themselves and variations proliferate. A Scottish glen becomes a Virginia holler, a silver dagger becomes a pen knife, rosy-red lips become lily-white hands. The details change so that the myths don’t have to.

Such is the case with the “The Ballad of John Henry,” whose 200+ documented versions form the basis of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Julia Wolfe’s work Steel Hammer and its theatrical adaptation, which comes to BAM in December. The story of John Henry is a familiar one: a spike-driving railroad worker of Bunyonesque strength beats a steam drill in a contest to bore through a mountain, only to “die with his hammer in his hands.” That folk music historian Alan Lomax called the legend “possibly America’s greatest piece of folklore” is no wonder: the mythos of the railroad, man vs. machine anxiety, bootstraps individualism—the muscular American imaginary is there in its entirety.

But the details are predictably fuzzy. Was John Henry 5’1” or 6’1”? Was his wife Polly Ann or Sally Ann? Did his hammer shine like silver or gold?

In Context: The Exalted

The Exalted, featuring Theo Bleckmann and Carl Hancock Rux, comes to BAM on October 28. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of articles and videos related to the show. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought below and by posting on social media using #TheExalted.

A Rite Opening Night Party

The BAM Lepercq Space done up for the 31st Next Wave, featuring the installation You Are Here by Ken Nintzel (Photos: Elena Olivo)

Last night, BAM celebrated the merging of two artistic powerhouses with the opening of A Rite, the dance theater celebration of the riot-inciting production that shook the Parisian art scene a century ago. Post show, artists from both Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Anne Bogart's SITI Company joined audience members and guests for an opening night party in the BAM Lepercq Space.  

BAM Blog Questionnaire: Will Bond & Jenna Riegel, A Rite dactors

by Rhea Daniels

Jenna Riegel and Will Bond in A Rite, photo by Paul B. Goode

Will Bond is an actor and a founding member of SITI Company and Jenna Riegel is a dancer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. They are both featured performers in A Rite, an incisive deconstruction of the riot inducing Rite of Spring. The piece is a collaboration between the BTJ/AZDC & SITI Company conceived, directed, and choreographed by Anne Bogart, Bill T. Jones, and Janet Wong in collaboration with the performers. As a product of this collaboration both Will and Jenna may now be referred to as dactors—a term coined by the companies to refer to the all-encompassing skills of the performers.

Did you have any preconceived notions about The Rite of Spring before you entered the studio? Had you seen/heard it performed before?
Jenna: At the time we started working on this I hadn’t ever seen a version. When we started working on it, I watched a few: the Joffrey Ballet version, Pina Bausch. In our workshop that we did at the beginning of the process we watched several excerpts of different versions. I was excited from the beginning that it would be a deconstruction, and about the question of whether it was necessary to even use all parts of the score or if we could use other sound.

Will: I'd seen The Rite of Spring as dance, and I've listened to it many times. SITI actually referenced it once in our production of Who Do You Think You Are, which is a lot about the brain, theory of mind, and neuroplasticity. I had some idea of what our A Rite might be like, but it hasn't turned out anything like that idea.

Star-Spangled Stravinsky

By Robert Jackson Wood

Stravinsky in his Hollywood studio

Few things seem further from purple-mountain-majesty America than sacrificial virgins and pagan Russian rituals, two things evoked by Igor Stravinsky’s modernist 1913 powder keg The Rite of Spring.  But as BAM raises the curtain next week on A Rite, whose brilliant makers, Bill T. Jones and Anne Bogart, are both decidedly American, it’s good to remember that the émigré iconoclast made his home in the US for over 30 years.

1925 marked Stravinsky’s first visit, and it was an exhilarating, neck-craning affair. “Your skyscrapers impressed me as leading to new visions in art,” he remarked. “What work! What energy there is in your immense country!” In 1939, he returned for good, settling in Boston to deliver his Harvard lectures, where he spoke famously about music as something that could reference only itself, and to conduct the Boston Symphony at the behest of his great champion Serge Koussevitzky.

On at least one of those programs, Stravinsky had included his own arrangement of the “The Star-Spangled Banner,” made, as he put it, out of a “desire to do my bit in these grievous times toward fostering and preserving the spirit of patriotism in this country.” But a police misreading of a law prohibiting national-anthem tampering led to a cease-and-desist, and Stravinsky—who had become a US citizen that same year—begrudgingly withdrew it from the bill.

Trojan Women (After Euripides) Opening Night Reception

 Trojan Women cast members Katherine Crockett, Brent Werzner, and Ellen Lauren (Photo: Elena Olivo)

Last week, SITI Company, under the direction of Anne Bogart, proudly returned to the BAM stage with its thrilling production of Trojan Women (After Euripides). The magnificent actors mingled with BAM Producers Council members in the Campbell Lobby of the BAM Harvey Theater to celebrate opening night.

Read on for more about the event and check out the full web album here!

welcometobobrauschenbergamerica

bobrauschenbergamerica

Stuffed chickens, backyard bathtubs, roller skates, pilled blankets: these are just a few of the homespun discards featured in Robert Rauschenberg’s work. As a young artist in New York in the 1950s, Rauschenberg would roam the streets around his studio, picking up everything from yesterday’s funny papers to worn out car tires and use them in his assemblages. In line with many of his Black Mountain contemporaries, Rauschenberg sought to close the gap between art and life by incorporating into his artwork the textures of American detritus.