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.

Next Wave Infamy: The Birth of the Poet

The Birth of the Poet

After the Paris premiere of Robert Wilson’s Deafman Glance in 1971, founding Surrealist Louis Aragon famously declared that the 29-year-old Wilson “is what we, from whom Surrealism was born, dreamed would come after us and go beyond us.” It’s a shame that none of the Dadaists were still around (or that none of the living Surrealists still adhered to Dada’s program of playfully nihilistic absurdity) when Wilson’s contemporary, Richard Foreman, broke onto the scene in the late 60s. A shame, because just as long as Wilson has been carrying the torch of Surrealism, expanding its theatrical possibilities, Foreman has been doing something similar with Dada.

Perhaps the silence of Dada’s founders toward Richard Foreman is a sort of Dadaistic passing of the torch. A goal of Dada performance, after all, was to enrage the audience, to shake them out of placid passivity. Such a nihilistic approach to creation cancels out the possibilities of tradition.

Which brings us to The Birth of the Poet, Foreman’s production of a play written by downtown legend Kathy Acker, with music by Peter Gordon and sets by David Salle. Part of 1985’s Next Wave Festival, The Birth of the Poet was reviled at its premiere: the audience (those who hadn’t already walked out) barraged the actors with boos, and the next day’s reviews unanimously echoed the audience’s rage. The Birth of the Poet is still considered one of the most panned shows of the Next Wave.