Fresh Hamm: Seeing Eye Screenings—Avant-Garde in 1943

Photo documenting a "seeing eye" screening for the blind, at BAM in 1943.

BAM is known for artistic experimentation, in particular since the Next Wave Festival began in 1983.

But did you know that 80 years before that, it hosted such events as this "seeing eye" screening of the Warner Bros.' musical film, The Desert Song, for residents of the Industrial Home for the Blind in 1943? As the film screened, a narrator described the unfolding events over a loudspeaker system. And prior to the start of the film, audience members received braille programs.

This is one of thousands of photos and artifacts which document BAM's history both onstage and as a cornerstone of daily life in Brooklyn.

The back of the photo with a description of the event.

Last-minute BAM-inspired Halloween Costume Ideas

by Chris Tyler

We’re throwing a FREE Halloween party this Friday and costumes are highly encouraged (there will be prizes!). Still haven’t planned yours? Take your inspiration from recent BAM programming with some of these easy-to-assemble costumes:

Accessing BAM’s Past: Cataloging Performing Artists for Better Browsing

by Sarah Gentile

Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers, 1938

You may already know a lot about the iconic artists that make up BAM’s history. But what if you don’t know much about who you’re looking for? What if you want to look for dancers, but you don’t know their names? So much of the 150-year story of BAM comprises the work of thousands of different performers. These performers may have only graced the stage at BAM a few times, but if performers came to BAM, they were artists worth knowing.

Accessing BAM’s Past: A New Digitization Grant for the Archives

by Sarah Gentile

1861 to 2013 is a long history for a Brooklyn institution. With all of the intensity of the now in performance, it’s easy to lose sight of the past without careful planning and preservation of the varied events that make up BAM’s history. That’s why we at the BAM Hamm Archives are especially excited to have a chance to record and share BAM’s past through a generous donation from the Leon Levy Foundation. Ultimately, we aim to share BAM’s history with the public, though there are a lot of steps along the way.

Fresh Hamm: Glenn Branca and Thurston Moore at BAM, 1983

While digging through the archives recently, we stumbled upon an exciting document: a photo of Glenn Branca’s ensemble performing his Symphony No. 3 (Gloria) at BAM in January 1983. In the late 70s and early 80s, Branca, one of the spearheads of the noisy (and often confrontational) No Wave scene, was developing his signature sound, characterized by the assaultive force of overdriven electric guitars. His ensembles played in all the hippest downtown venues of the day: the Mudd Club, the Kitchen, the Performing Garage, and Danceteria, among others.

In ‘83 it seems that Branca brought all his friends out to Brooklyn. In the photo Branca is conducting (we imagine him flailing about in his trademarked convulsions), and you can clearly spot a young Thurston Moore seated at a keyboard. While it’s hard to identify the others precisely, we do know that the ensemble also included such No Wave steadies as Michael Gira of Swans, Barbara Ess of Y Pants, Margaret DeWys of the Theoretical Girls, and Moore’s Sonic Youth band-mate Lee Ranaldo.

Photo: Tom Caravaglia

This Week in BAM History: The Trapp Family Choir, 1939

If you’ve seen The Sound of Music, then you’ve heard of the Trapp Family Singers (sometimes billed as the Trapp Family Choir). This large Austrian family of musicians rose to prominence during the Second World War, and their story became emblematic of the struggle for life meaningfully lived under fascism. On the evening of November 6, 1939, the Trapp Family Choir performed their unique repertoire of sacred, secular, and folk songs at BAM. 

The Trapp family had been on tour for nearly a year, after permanently leaving the Austrian Anschluss. Alas, contrary to the final scene of The Sound of Music, they did not “climb ev’ry mountain” and flee the Nazis by night, singing all the while. Instead they boarded a train in the middle of the day, after having signed all the requisite papers. With tour dates booked, contracts signed, and benefactors waiting in cities across Europe and the US, they landed in Ellis Island in late October and within days were filling BAM’s Music Hall with songs like “Innsbruck, Ich Muss Dich Lassen,” and madrigals such as “Now Is the Month of Maying.”

This Week in BAM History: Jerzy Grotowski, October 1969

Old, wise Grotowski

Forty-three years ago this week the course of American theater was permanently altered when Jerzy Grotowski landed in New York. For his first stateside visit, Grotowski and his Polish Laboratory Theatre presented under BAM’s auspices three of Grotowski’s most iconic productions: The Constant Prince, Akropolis, and Apocalypsis Cum Figuris (which in fact was the last piece Grotowski professionally directed, before he turned his attention to paratheatrical research). Many of the big players (and future big players) in New York’s avant-theatrical scene came out to see the enigmatic Polish genius at work, including members of the Living Theater, a young Robert Wilson, and Andre Gregory of My Dinner with Andre fame (which is the most widely circulated discussion of Grotowski’s work to date).

Harvey Oral History: On the BAM Theater Company

Richard Dreyfuss and Rene Auberjonois in BAM Theater Co.'s Julius Caesar. Photo: Martha Swope

HARVEY LICHTENSTEIN: The BAM Theater Company that we started was much more a rep company, and really, after having worked for many years in the ‘70s with the Royal Shakespeare Company, I had a dream of putting together a repertory company that would play in rotating rep with BAM. We really tried to do that, because there had been a number of attempts to do a rep company in New York in the ‘20s and ‘30s and ‘40s and ‘50s, and they all had failed. A rep company never worked in New York. And even when Lincoln Center started at the Beaumont, before that, they had a downtown place before the Beaumont was ready, and they tried.

And so we got David Jones, who was one of the directors with the Royal Shakespeare Company and who had come over a few years before that to do two productions with the RSC. It was Maxim Gorky’s Summer Folk and Love’s Labors Lost. Those were two terrific productions, the Gorky and the Shakespeare. We got to be friends, and during the course of that engagement and later, we began to talk about really trying to start a repertory company in New York.

JOHN ROCKWELL: He reestablished himself in New York, did he?

David Jones, director (seated), in rehearsal for The Winter's Tale.

LICHTENSTEIN: Yes, yes, yes. He’d never lived in New York. So he came strictly to start the BAM Theater Company, which would be a repertory company. His wife, Sheila Allen, who was a well-known actress, came and joined the company, and he put together a company. We opened that season with what I thought was a brilliant production of The Winter’s Tale. And that transformation scene at the end, where the statue of his long-dead wife, who he thinks is long dead, is brought to life, is one of the most incredible scenes in all of Shakespeare. And it was a terrific production. Whenever that scene took place, and I saw it almost every night, I would be in tears. Every night. It was amazing.

Walter Kerr was then the theater critic for The New York Times. He came, and the son of a gun fell asleep during the goddamn production and gave it a very mediocre, bad review. Much of it, he didn’t even see because he was asleep. And he can’t contradict me now because he’s dead. [Both chuckle.] But in any case, it was devastating. It was the first production that we were doing of a major thing. We’d raised almost a million dollars to start this thing, and it was a terrific production. It was a terrific production. And it got killed by The New York Times.

Boyd Gaines and Christine Estabrook in The Winter’s Tale. Photo: Ken Howard

(If you're hungry to know more about the BAM Theater Company, theatre critic Elisabeth Vincentelli will moderate a discussion with BAM Theater Co. veterans Austin Pendleton, Graciela Daniele and Rosemary Harris, this Monday, July 17, at 7 p.m. in the BAM Rose Cinemas. They will be joined by director Frank Dunlop.)     

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.

1978: BAM Theatre Company's Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Godot. Photo: Thomas Victor

There have been several star-driven New York productions of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Most recently, Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, John Goodman, and John Glover received positive reviews for the 2009 Roundabout Theater production at Studio 54 on Broadway. In 1988, the very high-profile Lincoln Center Theater off-Broadway production of Waiting for Godot starred Robin Williams, Steve Martin, F. Murray Abraham, and Bill Irwin, and was directed by Mike Nichols. It was a much-debated production.

The BAM Theatre Company production of Godot in 1978 is one that also bears remembering. Based on a production in German that Beckett himself directed at BAM a year earlier, this one was directed by Beckett’s assistant, Walter D. Asmus, at the Lepercq Space. It starred Sam Waterston, Austin Pendleton, Milo O’Shea, and Michael Egan. Earlier this year, Pendleton spoke to the New York Post theater critic Elisabeth Vincentelli about his memorable experience:

"It was this production of 'Godot' that almost, literally, ended my acting career. Or, looked at it another way, saved it. Beckett had directed his own production of 'Godot' at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin the year before, in his own German translation. That production had been brought to BAM, in German, with the German actors, in 1977, and got some of the most astonishingly good reviews I've ever read. Frank [Dunlop] asked Beckett to come over and direct five American actors in his company in it. Beckett had no desire to set foot in the United States, but sent his assistant, a brilliant young German director named Walter Asmus, to reproduce his [Beckett's] work. And reproduce it Walter did, down to each gesture and each line reading, even though those readings were based on the German translation.

"The rehearsals were astoundingly contentious. I, for example, once climbed a tall ladder attached to the wall, and threatened to jump if Walter gave me one more direction. Gradually, though, we began, somehow, all of us to get on the same page (or at least in the same chapter) with Walter, who had been the Soul of Patience through this whole experience. Whereupon I began the second act thinking, well, what the hell, why don't I just let everything go and listen to Sam Waterston? So intent was I in trying to carry though the directions that I had never actually listened to Sam. Whereupon everything, all the directions, everything, became miraculously easy to do. The applause that night at the end was actually triple what it had been. And from that time on the run was like a very, very fine dream."

Still waiting....

—Michael Messina, BAM Archives

On Grotowski's Penchant for Eggs

Grotowski

Jerzy Grotowski’s Polish Theatre Laboratory gave its first performances in New York in the fall of 1969. The performances were originally to take place at BAM and in the Hanson Place Central Methodist Church (next door to BAM), though once Grotowski arrived to scope out the premises he felt the spaces would not work. Instead, a suitable space was found at the Washington Square Methodist Church in Greenwich Village, and the performances were hosted by BAM.

Grotowski was an exacting artist—which in some situations led to tensions and miscommunications. Harvey Lichtenstein, who had invited Grotowski to BAM, remembers that during the premiere of The Constant Prince

"I come in with Ray Oliver [director of the Chelsea Theater Center], and we come in to see the play. And all the seats are taken. So we sit down on the floor, and Grotowski comes up to us and says, “I’m sorry, you’ve got to leave.” We say, “What do you mean, we gotta leave?” He said, “No sitting on floor allowed. No seat, no see.” I say [laughs] “You’ve got the producer here, and you’ve got the guy who’s giving the opening night party there.” “We don’t begin unless you leave.” So Oliver and I left the opening night. We went to his after-party. We got drunk before they got there. [Laughs.] But that was Grotowski."

Apparently, Grotowski and the team from the Polish Theatre Lab did not show up to the after-party until well after most of the guests had left, which annoyed Lichtenstein and the rest of Grotowski’s New York hosts. A hilarious letter exchange on this topic is currently on view in the exhibition From Brooklyn to the World, which also includes several other artifacts from Grotowski’s BAM visit. One of our favorite artifacts, however, is this excerpt from Lichtenstein’s oral history, on Grotowski’s penchant for eggs:

Harvey Oral History: Peter Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream

The following is excerpted from a transcription of an oral history conducted by BAM archivist Sharon Lehner and critic John Rockwell with BAM's ex-President, Harvey Lichtenstein. This excerpt, along with many others, is part of From Brooklyn to the World, the archival exhibition celebrating BAM's 150th anniversary, on view in BAM's lobby through August 31st.

A Midsummer Night's Dream. Photo: David Farrell

LICHTENSTEIN: You know, I met Peter Brook through Grotowski, through the Grotowski engagement, and he told me—this was in the fall of ’69—and he told me he was going back to Stratford[-upon-Avon, England] in ’70 and doing a new production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then I read the reviews. I guess Clive [Barnes] had gone over to see it and reviewed it in The Times. And, of course, it got the most astonishing set of notices you can imagine. I went over to see it in the fall of ’69, and I think probably, if I had to pick one performance, John, of all the ones I’ve seen that affected me more than anything else, it would be that performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream.

ROCKWELL: That’s interesting. I never saw it, but my wife feels the same way.

LICHTENSTEIN: Really?

ROCKWELL: Yes, that it would just change her life.

John Kane (right), as Puck. Photo: David Farrell

LICHTENSTEIN: Because it was a circus. It had a lot of scatological stuff. It had acrobatic stuff. It was wild, and yet it was the play, and it was the piece. At the end of the piece, when—I was sitting on the aisle—I remember seeing it at Stratford; it was the first time I was in Stratford, and Puck says those last lines, “Give me your hands if we be friends, and Robin will restore amends.” And then the whole cast poured off the stage and came down the steps and walked up the aisles, shaking hands with the people there. And by the time Puck came to me and I was on the aisle—what the hell was the guy’s name? John [Kane] was the actor’s name who played Puck. I grabbed him around. I wouldn’t let him go. He must have thought I was a madman. I was in tears, and I just wouldn’t let him go.

1977: The Origins of DanceAfrica

Chuck Davis Dance Company, circa 1970s

By the mid 1970s the Chuck Davis Dance Company was one of the highest profile African-American dance companies in New York City. Based in the Bronx, for many years the company had been busy with various community outreach programs. With grants from the NEA, CDDC taught choreography and physical education to Bronx teens, and in 1976 it was designated company in residence for the New York City Board of Education. Through lecture-demonstrations, movement workshops, and concerts, the company reached over 15,000 students in public schools across the city, serving as a motivational force designed to inspire greater academic achievement.

These activities laid the groundwork for what would come to be known as the first DanceAfrica: the February 1977 residency of the Chuck Davis Dance Company in the Lepercq space at BAM. Continuing its community-oriented work, CDDC added a new element to their mission: to promote the celebration of African heritage, which emerged as the hallmark of DanceAfrica.

Fresh Hamm: The Prada Pina

Harvey Lichtenstein presents Pina Baush with her limited edition Prada purse

In 1994, Pina Bausch brought Two Cigarettes in the Dark to BAM. At the time of this production, it was common for the opening night party to function as a gala/fund raising event. Miuccia Prada, subject of a Metropolitan Museum exhibition, had just opened her first New York store and expressed admiration for Pina Bausch and her work. Ms. Prada offered to get involved and she wanted to do something special in addition to sponsorship. She designed a limited edition purse that BAM could use for fundraising, but she didn’t stop there… she created the décor for the party, menu and even designed the beautiful official party invitations. The opening was completely sold out and by all reports the party was a big success. Pina was formally presented with a purse, which she accepted with her typical humility.

Invite to the "Two Cigarettes in the Dark" Opening Night Reception

The Prada Pina purse is made out of black parachute nylon with nickel hardware. It features a chain link handle and a kiss lock closure. Inside is an imprinted piece of leather that says, “BAM Pina Bausch November 1994.” Lynn Stirrup, Director of Special Events for BAM at the time, remembers the limited edition run being around 100. The purses were sold by BAM in 1994 in the lobby and also by direct mail invitation, for around $500 each. They were also sold at the Prada store. The BAM Hamm Archives recently acquired a single purse through eBay!

If you know any more specifics about this item, or have any BAM related memorabilia to share, please contact the BAM Hamm Archives.

—Louie Fleck, BAM archivist

Documenting Performance: the Pina Bausch Archives and the BAM Hamm Archives

Two Cigarettes in the Dark, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, 1994. Photo: Detlef Erler

Since 1984, BAM has been the only New York City venue presenting Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch—a friendship almost 30 years old. Over these years, hard-core Pina fans waited eagerly for the company to return while new devotees have been initiated into the fold, and virtually every performance sold out. BAM has also played an active role in helping to document the work.

BAM’s identity as a home for the contemporary performing arts is inextricably tied to Tanztheater Wuppertal. BAM’s Archives holds hundreds of photos, videos, press releases, clippings, invitations, posters, and correspondence from Tanztheater Wuppertal's 13 visits, presenting two dozen pieces.

It was therefore natural for Salomon Bausch, Marc Wagenbach, and Dirk Hesse of the Pina Bausch Foundation to visit the BAM Archives in October of 2010. They initially came to see the materials we had collected and we ended up talking over several days about the work of the company, our shared histories, and the unique challenges in documenting contemporary performance. As a result, I have visited Wuppertal twice in order to discuss the work of the Pina Bausch Archives. On my first visit, it was amazing to see performances in Wuppertal, including Two Cigarettes in the Dark, presented at BAM in 1994.




Read about the work of the Pina Bausch Foundation and the work being done on her Archives here.


Stay tuned for more updates on the project or contact the BAM Hamm Archives for more information.

Hey, did you find my underwear in the balcony? The Living Theatre, 1968

Frankenstein

The Living Theatre—whose performances have engaged (or antagonized, depending on who you ask) audiences from New York to Lebanon since the late 1940s—was in residence at BAM in October of 1968. Fresh from a self-imposed exile in Europe, the Living Theatre performed many of their hallmark pieces, including Paradise Now, and the Obie Award-winning Frankenstein. While this group of free radicals sought to enlighten BAM’s audiences to the spiritual utility of marijuana, free love, and non-violent revolution, BAM President and Executive Producer Harvey Lichtenstein was busy collecting stories to tell for the enlightenment of future generations of theatergoers. The following is from an oral history conducted with Lichtenstein in 2009.

LICHTENSTEIN: With the Living Theatre there are numerous stories. [Laughs.] I come in after a performance of, say, Paradise Now, and I walk in the morning into the lobby, and one of our guards stopped me. He said, “Mr. Lichtenstein, Mr. Lichtenstein, what’s this group you have here at night? Who are they?” I said, “It’s a theater group called the Living Theatre.” He said, “They do theater?” I said, “Yes.” I said, “Why are you asking?” He said, “Well, you know, we go through the theater in the morning and we clean up and stuff, and when I go up in the balcony”—this was in the playhouse—“when I got up in the balcony of the playhouse, it’s full of underwear,” he says. [Laughs.]

1864: The Brooklyn Sanitary Fair, Part 2

A Winslow Homer illustration of the Post Office at the Sanitary Fair

Immensely popular, the Brooklyn and Long Island Sanitary Fair ran from February 22 to March 8, 1864, and raised over $400,000, the highest sum of any Sanitary Fair in the country up to that time. Housed at the original Brooklyn Academy of Music premises on Montague Street, the Brooklyn Sanitary Fair drew masses from throughout the region. The March 12, 1864 issue of Frank’s Illustrated Newspaper describes the jovial crowd at the Fair:

Everyone seemed to be in the best possible humor—old men smiled though grimly—when their favorite corns were trodden upon, and the ladies didn’t seem to mind in the least having the gathers torn out of their dresses.

For nearly three weeks, the Academy became a microcosm of Brooklyn society. Three temporary buildings, connected to the Academy by bridges, were erected. Throughout the Fair’s quarters were several restaurants, art galleries, a soda fountain, and over a dozen vendors offering various goods made by local industries. The Sanitary Fair even had its own daily newspaper, The Drum-Beat, as well as a Post Office.

Stamp from the Brooklyn Sanitary Fair, with certificate of authenticity

Of all the Brooklyn Sanitary Fair’s attractions, the Post Office was perhaps the most popular. Located in the Proscenium Box to the right of the stage, the Post Office was staffed primarily by young ladies dressed to the nines, and it served as a site for playful flirtations. Messages, written predominantly by men, were posted to other fairgoers for the price of either 15¢ or 25¢. (It has been suggested that the higher rate was for messages written in verse.) The male fairgoers would attempt to impress their addressees—as well as the Post Office staff—with the mellifluence of their speech or the bravado of their verse, while the women of the Post Office pronounced their judgments by displaying the best messages of the day on a wall outside of the office. Up to 5,000 messages were posted during the Fair, and the Post Office raised over $800 ($11,000 in today’s USD) in the sale of stamps alone.

Stamp from an earlier Brooklyn fundraiser for the Sanitary Commission

The objects pictured here, along with many others from the Brooklyn Sanitary Fair, are currently on view in From Brooklyn to the World, the archival exhibition celebrating BAM's 150th anniversary.

1864: The Brooklyn Sanitary Fair, Part 1

Founded after the outbreak of the Civil War, the United States Sanitary Commission was a relief agency that took as its mission the supply of food, potable water, clean clothing, bandages, hospital equipment, bedding, writing supplies, and postage to soldiers in the Union Army. It was directed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, known today as one of the principal designers of Central Park and Prospect Park.

In an appeal sent to northern states on June 21, 1861, the Sanitary Commission stated that “four soldiers die of diseases incident to camp life for one that falls in battle… Sanitary measures, prudently devised and thoroughly executed, will do more to economize the lives of our soldiers, and thus save the nation men, money, and time, than could be effected by any improvement in the arms put into their hands.”

A New York weekly featuring illustrations from the Fair

While male soldiers fought and died on the battlefield, women were central to the workforce of the Sanitary Commission, working in the laundry, or as cooks, seamstresses and, especially, nurses. At the height of the Civil War, almost 3,000 nurses were working in makeshift Union hospitals—many of them volunteers. (Superintendent of Army Nurses, activist Dorothea Dix, insisted that her nurses be “past 30 years of age, healthy, plain almost to repulsion in dress and devoid of personal attractions.”) Women were also the driving force behind what were referred to as “Sanitary Fairs.” Organized via a network of women’s charitable societies, Sanitary Fairs held in cities across the northern states raised over $25 million for the relief of sick and wounded Union soldiers.

After a collaboration with their New York counterparts was postponed, Brooklyn women, representing various relief societies, took it upon themselves to erect their own fair. Housed at the original Brooklyn Academy of Music premises on Montague Street, the Brooklyn and Long Island Sanitary Fair ran from February 22 to March 8, 1864, and raised over $400,000, the highest sum of any Sanitary Fair in the country up to that time. 

The two objects pictured here, along with many others from the Brooklyn Sanitary Fair, are currently on view in From Brooklyn to the World, the archival exhibition celebrating BAM's 150th anniversary.

The Amaranth Dance Card

Dance cards, which originated in 18th-century Vienna, were immensely popular in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At formal balls, women would tie the often elaborate cards to their wrists or gowns. Each card listed the order of dances, along with spaces for the signatures of intended dance partners.

This dance card comes from a ball for the Amaranth Society held at the Academy on January 19, 1876. Founded in 1873, the Amaranth Society is a Masonic-affiliated women’s association. This card, along with many other treasures from the BAM Hamm Archives, is currently on view in From Brooklyn to the World, the archival exhibition celebrating BAM's 150th anniversary, which is located in the lobby and Natman Room at BAM. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

Fresh Hamm: Orson Welles at BAM, 1934

The young Welles

1934 was quite a year. While the Great Depression was in full swing, the first Soap Box Derby took place in Dayton, OH; George Oppen published his first book of poetry, Discrete Series, and then quit writing for the next 25 years; John Dillinger made his last bank robberies before being shot by police outside of the Biograph Theater in Chicago; Ralph Nader, Jane Goodall, Pat Boone, Giorgio Armani, and Joan Didion were born; Adolf Hitler became Germany’s Führer; and FDR signed into existence the centerpiece of the New Deal, the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

But that’s not all. Here in our little corner of New York, Orson Welles appeared as Octavius Moulton-Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a period piece about the courtship between British Romantic poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. The 19-year-old Welles had been in New York for a couple of years, and was already making a name for himself. Just under two years later, he would direct the piece that catapulted him to fame: the so-called “Voodoo Macbeth” at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem, created under the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project.

Surprisingly, we at the BAM Hamm Archives weren’t aware of this Welles-BAM connection. In a happy accident we stumbled across the vintage program for The Barretts of Wimpole Street—on eBay, of all places! We snatched up the program and it is now a proud part of our collection. We add yet another amazing arti/fact to the ever-unfolding history of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.