In Context: Kate's Kids

Kate's Kids, Rufus and Martha Wainwright's musical tribute to their legendary mother, comes to the Howard Gilman Opera House on Wednesday, June 26. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of articles, videos, and original blog pieces related to the show. Once you've seen it, help us keep the conversation going by telling us what you thought below.

Ibsen and Munch—What's the Connection?

by William Lynch

Edvard Munch, The Dance of Life, 1925. Photo: Munch Museet, Oslo.

Ibsen and Munch. What's the connection? Besides being two giants of Norwegian culture when Scandinavia was a hotbed of artistic ferment, I never really thought about it until I saw the promotional image that BAM marketing is using to promote the current production of The Master Builder, directed by Andrei Belgrader.

It was mistakable, at least to me. The arresting black-and-white photograph of actors Katherine Borowitz, John Turturro, and Wrenn Schmidt had all the weight, psychological insight, and similar composition to several of  Edvard Munch’s familiar works—among them Woman from 1925 and more specifically The Dance of Life from 1899—1900.

Friends of BAM Learn About the Royal Ballet of Cambodia's Dazzling Costumes

by Sarah Mischner

Sylvain Lim. Photo: Elena Olivo

Anyone who attended the Royal Ballet of Cambodia’s The Legend of Apsara Mera last week will admit to being dazzled by the ornate costumes worn by the dancers. Friends of BAM gathered in the Hillman Studio for an afternoon reception and discussion on these costumes given by fashion and costume designer Sylvain Lim.

Lim, a native Cambodian who lived in Paris for more than 30 years and worked in fashion houses including Dior and Balmain, described the history of the costumes and their construction—a process that has barely changed since the 11^th century.

Costumes in Cambodian ballet consist of pieces of raw silk or velvet brocade, stitched with thick spring-like coils of golden threads, metalwork, and sequins or beads to catch the light. It can take one person five months to create one costume, or four people can make a single costume in a month with three people doing the intricate embroidery. The costumer works up to the moment a dancer goes onstage; the dancers are sewn into their costumes. (Those dancers playing male roles often can’t use the bathroom for up to 4 hours.) As Lim explained, the Royal Ballet dancers' costumes are stitched tightly to their bodies, which helps them make the shapes of the deliberate choreography.

Dancing Myths—The Legend of Apsara Mera

by Marina Harss

Photo: Andres Jiras

In accordance with the tradition of Cambodian classical dance, The Legend of Apsara Mera, in the Howard Gilman Opera House from May 2—4, begins with a tribute to the dance teachers, who transmit the steps from generation to generation, and to the spirits, whose earthly embodiment the dancers are meant to represent. This art, with its symbolism of survival and renewal, is rooted in the past and closely linked to the sacred. During the Khmer Empire (802—1431), when it was first developed, dancers were seen as intermediaries between the temporal and spiritual realms, living embodiments of the apsaras—or celestial dancers. Their likenesses, carved in bas-reliefs on temple walls, reveal poses recognizable even today. With serene, hieratic expressions, they tilt their heads and gaze out at the world. Their legs are bent in a soft plié, fingers curled back from their palms like flower petals. Their harmonious poses speak of an art that aspires to timeless transcendence and cosmic beauty.

If You Like…: Crossing Brooklyn Ferry Edition (Part Two)

by Jane Jansen Seymour

In the second of a series, here are two more bands from the Brooklyn music scene that will be appearing at this year’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry at BAM from April 25 to 27. These groups are just another point of pride for the borough among many others in the vast line up.

If you like Foals, check out Here We Go Magic

Here We Go Magic (Saturday, April 27) delivers songs like waves of thought, seemingly simplistic on the surface but actually complex arrangements of guitars and percussion, similar to Foals, Real Estate, and Beach Fossils. Singer/songwriter Luke Temple flaunts his folk music background within an indie rock structure, alongside core members Michael Bloch on bass and drummer Peter Hale. (The group branches out into a quintet when touring.) Its fourth album, 2012’s A Different Ship, was created under the watchful eye of Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, as rhythmic patterns receive a similar treatment in both bands. Key tracks such as “Make Up Your Mind” and “How Do I Know” seem to have a life all their own, while gamely inviting the audience along for the ride. 

In Context: Planetarium

Sufjan Stevens and Bryce Dessner. Photo: Daniel Boud

Planetarium, the love letter to the solar system from Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, and Bryce Dessner, runs at BAM until Sunday, March 24. Context is everything, so get even closer to Mercury, Venus, and the rest with this curated selection of articles, videos, and original blog pieces related to the show. For those who've already seen it, help us keep the conversation going by telling us what you thought below.

When Musical Stars Align

by Jane Jansen Seymour

Planetarium. Photo courtesy of the artists

Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly, and Sufjan Stevens are musical multi-taskers and have been friends for over a decade. The idea of finding a project to tackle together floated around while tours, recordings, and maxed-out schedules got in the way. Their idea was to create a true collaboration, not just something shaped by emailing musical files back and forth. In Muhly’s words, they wanted “to have that effect of everyone cooking in the same kitchen at the same time, as opposed to an assembly line.” Over the course of a few years, Planetarium materialized simply by carving out time together. Muhly is a composer in residence at Muziekegebouq Eindhoven in Holland, which, in collaboration with the Sydney Opera House and the Barbican Centre in London, commissioned Planetarium, at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House from March 21 to 24.

The (Benefit of a) Suit

The Benefit dinner included several spectral suits floating overhead.
Nonhlanhla Kheswa (L) and William Nadylam (R), the well-dressed lead actors in The Suit. (All photos: Elena Olivo)

BAM’s annual Theater Benefit last week honoring renowned theater, opera, and film director Peter Brook and his production of The Suit got us musing about men’s fashion—and didn't the gents (and ladies) turn it out. At dinner, always fashionable BAM Executive Producer Joseph Melillo (photo below), outfitted in a Michael Kors suit (a change from his usual Hugo Boss), recalled Brook’s long history with BAM and his partnership with visionary impresario Harvey Lichtenstein, who served as long-time president and executive producer of BAM. Together, Brook and Lichtenstein masterminded the renovation of the Majestic Theater, now the BAM Harvey Theater, to host the director’s 1987 staging of the epic The Mahabharata.

Read on for more on Peter, Harvey, and this special evening. The Suit runs through Feb 2.

A Dancer's Perspective: Tamara Riewe of Trisha Brown Dance Company

by Tamara Riewe

Tamara (center) in I'm Going to Toss My Arms... Photo: Laurent Phillippe

The week of shows is upon us, our days of padding barefoot into the office kitchen to increase the line for the microwave are numbered. The office staff at BAM have been incredibly welcoming, kindly averting their eyes from our damp, rumpled rehearsal clothes as we inevitably corner them in the small yellow room, admiring their chic outfits and artfully tousled hair.

For the last month-and-a-half my company has rehearsed in the Attic Studio of the opera house in preparation for this show. Performing in New York City is always a big deal; the stakes feel higher here at home, with teachers, peers, students, and friends swelling the audience. This January marks my seventh year in the company, so I've had the pleasure/terror of performing at BAM before. I can still taste the sheer exuberance of dancing Glacial Decoy: the vast stage inviting us to take wing in our billowing white dresses, daring our limbs to devour the space as if chasing Rauschenberg's flitting photographs into infinity. To be perfectly honest, part of me had wanted to pull a George Costanza and leave on that high note, but plans were made to be broken. Especially when one has the chance to be a part of dance history: dancing the final creations of a choreographer as intriguing and lauded as Trisha Brown in a theater as storied and celebrated as BAM.

The Laramie Project Cycle—A Return to Laramie

by Dan Bacalzo

Photo by Michael Lutch

It’s been more than a decade since Tectonic Theater Project first traveled to Laramie, Wyoming, in the wake of the brutal murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard. “We found a community that was devastated by both the crime and the national media onslaught that the crime generated,” says Moisés Kaufman, the artistic director of the company. “As a result of this, the citizens of Laramie were forced to engage in conversations about their town and about their beliefs that most communities don’t.”

This kind of soul-searching led to Tectonic’s best-known creation, The Laramie Project. The documentary theater piece, which uses the actual words of the people of Laramie, had its world premiere in Denver and debuted off-Broadway in 2000. It is an in-depth exploration of how a town responds to tragedy, including multiple viewpoints that offer a complex portrait of a community in crisis.

As the 10th anniversary of Shepard’s murder approached, Kaufman asked several members of the company to help create what was initially planned as a brief epilogue. However, it soon became clear that they were gathering enough material to make an entire second play, The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, which is being performed at the BAM Harvey Theater along with the original as The Laramie Project Cycle from February 12 to 24, including weekend marathons including both parts.

Peter Brook—Wisdom from The Suit's director

by Alicia Dhyana House

Peter Brook. Photo: Colm Hogan

Peter Brook is considered theater royalty and so I was absolutely thrilled to interview the legendary director for an article I wrote for BAMbill about his current production, The Suit. Brook has paved the way for generations of theatermakers, including me, and has exhilarated theatergoers around the world with his daring innovations.

I was first introduced to Peter Brook as an undergraduate at San Francisco State University. My theater history professor, Mohammed Kowsar, was impassioned about this director and his enthusiasm rubbed off on me. Since that class I have seen as many of Brook’s productions as possible and I have a bookshelf dedicated to books written by or about this consummate artist.

Even in his late 80s, Brook still challenges conventional theater with his subject matter and execution. He vehemently searches for and tells human stories that are screaming to be told. Narratives that are universal, crossing borders in time and space. Brook teaches us that theater is as vital to our lives as the air we breathe. And The Suit (at the BAM Harvey Theater through Feb 2) is a stunning example of a tale bursting at the seams to be told and to be witnessed. And like life itself, it is both heartbreaking and uplifting.

Confessions of a Motion Addict

Photo of Trisha Brown and Stephen Petronio by Lois Greenfield

Excerpt from a memoir by Stephen Petronio. Trisha Brown Dance Company appears at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House January 28—30, 2016. 

I met Trisha Brown in 1979 while working as stage manager for a Movement Research benefit performance. When she arrived, I greeted her at the theater door. She smiled as I took her white metal make-up case and led her to the dressing room. I hadn’t seen her work yet and I can’t remember the conversation—nothing much was said—but on that brief walk she completely won me over.

That night she danced Watermotor and a short excerpt of the work-in-progress that would become Glacial Decoy. I was floored by what I saw, not only for its exhilarating beauty. Her language was startlingly new—a twisted blend of wild-ass, intuitive sensuality, and cool rigor that I understood on a genetic level. I was instantly hooked and knew I’d found a home.

I was the first male in the Trisha Brown Dance Company where I stayed for seven years, from 1979 to 1986. A sweating, snorting bull in a china shop alongside of one of the most intelligent and silky bodies on the planet, I was duly challenged. Fortunately, Trisha had a kind of alchemical effect on me from the beginning. (I’m not alone in this respect). She continually asked me to think and dance beyond my grasp. More often than not, and to my great surprise, I found myself doing it.

The Suit—Love, Apartheid Style

by Alicia Dhyana House

William Nadylam & Nonhlanhla Kheswa-Réveil in The Suit. Photo: Johan Persson

Peter Brook is a theatrical prophet. For the past seven decades the contributions of this visionary British director have traversed theater, film, and literary worlds. Brook has spent a lifetime exploring his craft and the world in pursuit of stories eager to be told. Now in his 80s, Brook continues to extend the boundaries of theater by stripping down drama to its universal human essentials. His latest production, The Suit, hailed by The Daily Telegraph as “unforgettable” and “theatre as it should be,” arrives at the BAM Harvey Theater from Jan 17 to Feb 2.

Originally a short story by South African author Can Themba, The Suit is an intimate tale shaped by adultery and simmering revenge set in a Johannesburg township in the 1950s. “It could have only occurred to the incredible imagination to somebody living under oppression,” Brook said in a recent phone interview from his home in Paris. “It’s the story of a man’s oppression as a revenge on his wife who he loves dearly. It’s almost as if the author unconsciously dramatized what it was to be a young person loving a South Africa and at the same time burning with anger and fury because he was not being recognized.”

BAM Winter Reading List

Martin and Kingsley Amis; photo by Dmitri Kasterine

Lo, the holidays are upon us. And with the holidays comes a little down-time at BAM, that rare period during which there’s nary an innovative Caesar, adventurous Faust, or aspiring Pina protégé anywhere in sight. Hopefully, you’re with some variant of kith and kin or warm-winter napping and missing BAM only a little bit. But in case you find yourself in need of some sort of BAM fix, we've put together a little winter reading list that might do something to ease the pain. Enjoy these readings, each related to an upcoming event in our Winter/Spring season.

The Suit: A Storybook Introduction

The Suit is opening the 2013 Winter/Spring season at BAM. The play, directed by the renowned Peter Brook, is adapted from South African writer Can Themba's witty, unsettling short story of the same name. Themba was a journalist, writing investigative pieces for Drum Magazine in addition to fiction in the 1950s and sixties. He was also a pretty cool-looking dude.

I haven't seen The Suit adapted for the stage yet, but I read the story and offer below a "storybook introduction." Don't worry, I don't spoil the end. We'll post the rest of the story after the run.

The story continues after the jump.

A BAM Platform for 2013

By Robert Wood

In the Winter/Spring of 2013, and as a performing arts organization in which you have placed your utmost trust, BAM promises to do the following (aka the BAM 2013 Winter/Spring Season has been announced!):

• Maintain a close watch on mounting civil tensions in Rome, West Africa surrounding Julius Caesar, rumored to have eyes on the throne.

• Establish a moratorium on aging architects seeking to quell libidinal or existential frustrations through their work. Relatedly, recommend that they not fall off of buildings built for such misguided purposes.

• Explore the diplomatic function of rappers in the Middle East and the use of hip-hop as a means of consolidating progressive revolutionary fervor. Additionally, establish diplomatic ties with Cambodia through former princess and choreographer Naradom Buppha Devi.

• Enable the Old Testament to be taught on stages, as long as it is presented via rhetorically brilliant French Baroque opera.

• Allocate funding for a new vehicle that will explore the solar system through the tuneful lens of a doe-eyed indie-music heartthrob and others. Unrelatedly, accelerate research into paranormal activity at Victorian manor houses.

• Pass hate-crime legislation as well as statutes protecting spouses for being punished for their infidelities with their lover’s clothing

• Assure that veteran choreographers returning from tours of duty away from BAM have a performance home when they return, allowing them to carry on with brilliance as they left it.