A Love Letter to BAM

This January, playwright, collagist, and Richard B. Fisher Next Wave Award recipient Charles Mee returns to BAM for a fourth time with The Glory of the World. Here—in an excerpt from 2011's BAM: The Complete Works—Mee shares dynamic memories of America's oldest performing arts center:

Mee's The Glory of the World comes to BAM Jan 16—Feb 6. Photo: Bill Brymer

By Charles Mee

We live in a world these days where it’s taken for granted that BAM is one of the greatest cultural institutions on the planet. And yet, not long ago—certainly within my own lifetime—it was a big old dark neglected pile of stones right off Flatbush Avenue where no one I knew ever thought to go.

The first time I ever walked into the theater at BAM it was completely inadvertent. A friend had invited me to see a theater piece called The Photographer/Far from the Truth, inspired by the work of the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose obsession with animal and human locomotion led to developing a photographic means to project a series of images that had been captured by a set of still cameras: galloping horses, running bison, nude women descending staircases. I knew Muybridge’s work, and I thought it was great, but, of course, I knew no one could make a good theater piece out of it. Still, I went anyway, because I had nothing else to do, and I thought it might be kind of exciting to venture out into the unknown wilderness—and stop for some cheesecake at Junior’s.

The Executive Files: the first Next Wave show

Joe Melillo (center) with Bob Telson and BAM staff during Next Wave Festival 1983

On my first day on the job to produce the inaugural Next Wave Festival for the autumn of 1983, I arrived in President/Executive Producer Harvey Lichtenstein’s office to start my duties and responsibilities. I was handed a sheet of paper with a list of names of artists and productions. My first management decision was to make a manila file folder with each name from the list, and I began the task of contacting those individuals and researching those productions.

It was clear that I was going to produce The Photographer: Far From the Truth, a three-part, 90 minute work to a Philip Glass score, performed by his ensemble. The first section was theater, the second part a multimedia work of Eadward Muybridge images, and the final section was a dance work. JoAnne Akalaitis, a founding member of Mabou Mines, was engaged to be the director. She also happened to be the ex-wife of Philip Glass. I remember our first meeting to create the production. She had a notebook that she had filled with images, words, and designs. The Photographer had been produced in Holland, but her production was going to be a completely new interpretation.

She selected the writer Robert Coe to write the script for the first act which was going to reference sections from Muybridge’s biography. Wendell Harrington was hired to visualize the second section. She was going to use large-scale projections of the human figure in motion and actually also animate those still photographs. The third section would be choreographed by David Gordon.

Photo: Johan Elbers

Photo: Johan Elbers

It was very much like producing three different works of art, given the discrete art for each section. There were five weeks of rehearsal, a technical week, and the inaugural production of  the first Next Wave Festival opened in the Opera House. New York audiences had never seen a performance work on such a scale—the Philip Glass Ensemble performing his propulsive musical score, and the bombardment of visual material and the kinetic imagistic movement of David Gordon all contributed to a compelling, thrilling evening of contemporary, non-traditional art making that continues in the Next Wave Festival tradition today.

 —Joseph V. Melillo, Executive Producer, BAM

This Week in BAM History: Between Sun Ra and Philip Glass

Ad from the Village Voice, October 1969

As the 1960s drew to a close, the varying tastes of the psychedelic hippie and civil rights crusader dovetailed across two nights at BAM. On October 10th, 1969, jazz prophet of the outer limits Sun Ra, and the always explosive if precise poet and dramatist LeRoi Jones (who would soon discard his imposed moniker and become Amiri Baraka) graced the opera house stage at BAM. As if this weren’t enough to glut even the most insatiable cultural epicure, the following night brought an even greater bounty as The Band (known then as the backing band behind Bob Dylan’s breakthrough into electric rock) and the legendary Beat poet Allen Ginsberg took the stage. These two nights in Brooklyn stand as a convergence of some of America’s most radical minds, in what was surely one of the last great near-trysts of a tumultuous era.