In Context: Rimbaud in New York

In this prismatic collage of song and story, theater company The Civilians (Paris Commune, 2012 Next Wave Festival) use music-theater to consider the life and lasting influence of modernism’s most elusive enfant terrible: Arthur Rimbaud. Context is everything, so get even closer to Rimbaud in New York with this curated selection of content related to the show. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought below and by posting on social media using #RimbaudNY.

Kronos Quartet's Unlikely Collaborations

Kronos Quartet, photo by Jay Blakesburg

Few string quartets can claim to have been around for over 40 years, small changes in personnel aside. But fewer still—we'll go out on a limb and say precisely zero, aside from Kronos Quartet—can boast of having commissioned over 800 new works and collaborated with so many artists outside of the classical and new-music purview. Maybe no one told Nine Inch Nails, the Romanian gypsy band Taraf de Haïdouks, Tom Waits, Noam Chomsky, or even Kronos itself that the string quartet was born out of the princely courts of 18th-century Austria and not the postmodern schizophrenia of the shuffle mode. But whatever the reason for their open-minded audaciousness, we're grateful for it.

Add Natalie Merchant, Sam Amidon, Olivia Chaney, and Rhiannon Giddens (September 20), as well as Laurie Anderson (September 23—27) to the list, all of whom are coming to BAM with Kronos as part of Nonesuch Records at BAM. For a little context, here are 10 other Kronos collaborations that have turned preconceived notions of their genre inside out.

In Context: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Photo: Fiona Shaw, courtesy of Phyllida Lloyd

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner runs at BAM through December 22. Context is everything, so get even closer to Coleridge's famous ill-fated ocean voyage, the amazing Fiona Shaw, and more with this curated selection of articles, videos, and original blog pieces related to the show. For those of you who've already seen it, help us keep the conversation going by telling us what you thought below.

Fiona Shaw Reads Eliot, Yeats, and Patti Smith

by Robert Wood


For those of you who think that poetry is better read than heard, or that our age is too cynical for public recitations of rhymed verse, or that those who feel differently must sleep in a beret and with a copy of Ginberg’s “Howl” under their pillow, we offer you… Fiona Shaw, coming to BAM next week to perform Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ("Water, water, everywhere," etc.).

Fans of Harry Potter will know her as the irascible Aunt Petunia Dursley. Fans of searching for meaning in a godless world will know her as Winnie, the woman buried up to her neck in mud from Beckett’s Happy Days (BAM 2008 Winter/Spring Season). All should know her as one of the most commanding actors they're likely to see on a New York stage.

Here, get to know her as sufferer of the cruelest month in Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” the laboring lover-poet in Yeats’ “Adam’s Curse,” the heartbroken wailer of Patti Smith’s “Wilderness,” and the celestial dreamer in Yeat's "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.”

1. “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot

King of New York—Remembering Lou Reed at BAM

by Susan Yung

Lou Reed during Songs for 'Drella (1989).
Photo: BAM Hamm Archives

"Ordered sound is music," Lou Reed said in his last video interview, at Rollingstone.com. Reed, who died recently at 71, had a way of reducing complex thoughts and feelings to their essence, as he did so eloquently in his songs. In The New Yorker, Patti Smith remembers him as "a complicated man." Lou, whose name was both a cheer and a loving jeer, has been tagged as "the poet of New York," and by David Bowie as no less than "the king of New York." He was famous for never sugarcoating, neither his lyrics nor in interviews. "He was curious, sometimes suspicious, a voracious reader, and a sonic explorer," Smith wrote.

In three productions at BAM—Songs for 'Drella, Time Rocker, and POEtry—Reed expanded on his core body of rock music, from the Velvet Underground through solo projects, that had gained him a huge following. Songs for 'Drella (1989) reunited Reed with fellow VU co-founder John Cale, and was a paean to Andy Warhol, who had died two years earlier. Even in such a short span, Reed's frank perspective found its way into his fond, sometimes sardonic lyrics in tribute to the wigged artist. It was a powerful, intimate song-cycle performed movingly by Cale and Reed—part-time conspirators, but mostly wry observers, of Warhol's Factory.

Who is Benjamin Smoke?

by Ryan Mauldin

Donning a frayed, cotton dress and a shabby beehive wig, she drags on her cigarette and teases the audience with intermittent flashes of skin, if only they will pay for a glimpse. Ms. Opal Foxx, né Robert Dickerson, queen of a thriving, close-knit music scene in Cabbagetown, a former mill town in Atlanta, Georgia, is the inspiration for David Dorfman's production Come, and Back Again, which explores "the mess we create and the mess we leave behind."

In the late 1980s Benjamin, Dickerson's elected moniker, fronted the Opal Foxx Quartet, then the premier group of Cabbagetown’s underground music scene, which included the Jody Grind with Kelly Hogan and Chan Marshall (Cat Power). Opal Foxx, between 10 and 14 members, was a junkyard jamboree of rock, blues, and honkytonk filtered through a punk ethos and the gravelly baritone of its cross-dressing frontman, a confluence of Flannery O’Connor and the Cockettes. The band’s debut album, The Love That Won’t Shut Up (an allusion to Lord Alfred Douglass’ line, “the love that dare not speak its name”), included songs produced by Michael Stipe, who saw them perform in Athens.

A Rare Jem

by Adriana Leshko

Jem Cohen is a filmmaker, photographer, teacher, and activist whose career has been inexorably intertwined with music—from his earliest years forging an artistic identity in the DC punk scene, to the non-traditional “documentaries” about bands like Fugazi and Smoke that put him on the larger cultural map, to his long term relationships with musicians Patti Smith (an executive producer of Cohen’s recent, rapturously reviewed feature film Museum Hours) and Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto, both frequent collaborators.

What he is not is a music video director. Or, as he puts it: “It was always my intention to pull ‘music videos’ as far away from being commercial promos as possible.” Still, over a long and varied career, he has made numerous short films set to the music of artistic friends and colleagues, including R.E.M, Elliot Smith, Jonathan Richman, and many, many others.

Here, in honor of Jem’s BAM mainstage debut at the BAM Harvey this Thursday with the film and music hybrid We Have an Anchor—featuring live performances by Guy Picciotto (Fugazi), Jim White (Dirty Three), T. Griffin (The Quavers),  Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor), Jessica Moss (Thee Silver Mt. Zion), Sophie Trudeau (Godspeed You! Black Emperor), as well as special guest vocalist Mira Billotte (White Magic)—we present one of our utterly subjective favorites: an intimate, workaday domestic and artistic portrait of rock goddess Patti Smith at her most human, set to Smith’s mesmerizing cover of Nirvana’s "Smells like Teen Spirit" (with cameos by Smith’s cats and her son Jackson):

Are You Ready to Rock… at BAM?!

by Louie Fleck

A BAM ad from 1969

Rock music has been a big part of BAM—in stand-alone concerts, and as essential elements in multi-genre productions. With this week's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry festival, inquiring minds need to know more!

Mention BAM and you might think of groundbreaking Robert Wilson productions like Einstein on the Beach. But consider that his collaborator Philip Glass created his ensemble on a rock band template. And of other Wilson productions, Time Rocker's score was created by original New York rocker Lou Reed. What about The Forest? The name of that composer is David Byrne! We should also mention the three Tom Waits/Robert Wilson productions: Alice, Black Rider, and Woyzeck.

If you think of BAM as a home for dance, you may recall that Trisha Brown tapped the Grateful Dead's "Uncle John’s Band" for her piece, Accumulation, and Bob Dylan’s "Early Morning Rain" for Line-Up.

The BAM Fisher Files: Steven Cosson

Steven Cosson is a co-writer and director of Paris Commune, which runs from October 4—7 at the BAM Fisher. 

Our Show: This theatrical event revives the radical cabaret of 19th-century Paris to tell the story of the Paris Commune, a spontaneous popular uprising of working-class Parisians in 1871. Arguably the first socialist revolution in Europe, the Paris Commune was an anarchic festival of the underclass. While the Commune was violently defeated, its legacy inspired a century of revolution and change.

Sights and Sounds:

The music ranges from raucous popular songs to opera, from rude and hilarious satires of the Emperor to the future communist anthem “The Internationale,” written by Commune leader Eugène Pottier, and Communard Jean-Baptiste Clément’s “Cherries of Spring,” which became the anthem of May’68. All songs speak directly to the events of the Commune using a variety of narrative and visual techniques to tell the story, such as a Can-Can that charts the history of France in two minutes.