William Forsythe, contemporary master

by Rhea Daniels

With the majority of choreographer William Forsythe’s professional work happening in Europe, anytime he brings his company to town is an exciting opportunity to see what this contemporary master has been up to. On the occasion of The Forsythe Company’s return to the Next Wave Festival with Sider we highlight some of Forsythe's productions at BAM.

Forsythe debuted at BAM with Ballet Frankfurt who performed EIDOS : TELOS in 1998. The piece cemented Forsythe’s status as a contemporary master and an heir to Balanchine. The dance pulls established ballet structure apart and reassembles it with onstage musicians and bits of quirky deconstructed ballet vocabulary. It truly seemed to transport ballet into the modern era.

Producer's Note: Gordon Chambers and Magos Herrera return to BAMcafé Live

by Darrell McNeill

BAMcafé Live week three: We are on the verge of complete righteousness—two amazing shows played to packed houses! BCL is definitely hitting a mid-season groove.

What can be fittingly said about Hank & Cupcakes? Simply, they dropped a bomb on the Lepercq. Close your eyes and you were transported back to the Ritz when bands like Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Thompson Twins, and Modern English ruled the dance floors. And the following night, blues was conjured at its most uplifting and communal as International Blues Express, featuring Sidi Toure and Cedric Watson, elevated the room with a night of culturally and spiritually transcendent music.

After three straight weeks of artists making their BCL debuts, two very popular favorites return for week four. Award-winning soul singer-songwriter Gordon Chambers returns to the café on Friday, October 11, performing from his three independently released albums and his extensive catalog of hits with the biggest names in R&B music. On Saturday, October 12, Latin jazz chanteuse Magos Herrera continues her musical journey though the nations of Central and South America, marrying the indigenous rhythms and melodies of those diverse cultures to American jazz modes.

Subtle Decadence:Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Ars Subtilior

By Robert Jackson Wood

Baude Cordier's rondeau "Belle, Bonne, Sage"

Austere three-part harmonies intoning liturgies in Latin. Monks in robes copying out ledger lines by candlelight. Music notated partially in red ink and shaped like a heart?

It’s an extreme case, for sure. But the iconic musical valentine (shown above) by 14th century French composer Baude Cordier nevertheless fascinates in its flamboyance amid the more sober images we tend to associate with the musical Middle Ages. How to explain this quirky musical wink?

For one, as an example of the mannered style known as ars subtilior—“the more subtle art”—which forms the sonic and structural basis of choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s upcoming works Et Atendant and Cesena. A modern coinage, ars subtilior is the name used to refer to a small group of mostly secular works, created around the papal court at Avignon in the late 14th century, that attempted to push notational and rhythmic techniques of the time to their limits. A call to innovation had been made by a small coterie of court intellectuals for whom complexity in music was king. Composers answered, producing music that not only helped to flatter the cognoscenti’s arcane erudition but that also ushered in one of music history’s first periods of technical decadence. Innovation had been advocated not for expressive ends, but for innovation itself.

BAM Illustrated: Muhammad Ali Ascends the Throne

The Sweet Science Suite premieres at BAM this Friday. Illustrator Nathan Gelgud took a look at Muhammad Ali, the chief inspiration for Fred Ho's latest work, by reading David Remnick's excellent biography of the great fighter, King of the World.

A Rite Opening Night Party

The BAM Lepercq Space done up for the 31st Next Wave, featuring the installation You Are Here by Ken Nintzel (Photos: Elena Olivo)

Last night, BAM celebrated the merging of two artistic powerhouses with the opening of A Rite, the dance theater celebration of the riot-inciting production that shook the Parisian art scene a century ago. Post show, artists from both Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Anne Bogart's SITI Company joined audience members and guests for an opening night party in the BAM Lepercq Space.  

Float Like a Martial Artist

Fred Ho. Photo: Robert Adam Mayer

The Sweet Science Suite: A Scientific Soul Music Honoring of Muhammad Ali. The title spells out the essential intrigue of Fred Ho’s new opus, at the BAM Harvey Theater on October 11 & 12. But add to the mix martial arts choreography by Emmanuel Brown, one of the stars of Broadway’s Spider-Man and a previous collaborator on Ho’s projects, and prepare to be ultra-dazzled. BAMbill asked the pair a few questions.

Q: What inspired the inclusion of martial arts AND hip-hop in the choreography for The Sweet Science Suite?
Fred Ho: Since 1996, I’ve pioneered a new genre of performing arts, for which a variety of descriptors have been applied, such as “martial arts music/theater,” “manga opera,” “martial arts ballet,” etc. During that time, I was very bored by much of the performing arts—music, and especially dance—that refused to confront human conflict at the level of intensity of war and violence, and actually be bold about exhibiting such conflict.

In addition, my intention and desire to create a new Asian (Chinese) American expressive culture made me realize that Chinese—and Asian—martial arts could become the bold, new, and explosive performing arts movement expression; have tremendous appeal to young people; who, no matter how much we want to deny it, were being saturated in popular culture with the martial arts; and with which legendary, epic conflicts and clashes could be conveyed, just as they had been for centuries in Chinese (and Asian) literature, theater/opera, and legend.

Since I was very young, black music and radical politics has greatly inspired and catalyzed my own unique role in life as both an artist and activist. My Afro-Asian political and cultural sensibility would connect urban hip-hop and the martial arts (e.g. Shaolin hip-hop), just as urban youth have been doing for several decades (cf. Wu-Tang Clan), finding Afro-Asian connectivity in a myriad of cross-fertilized forms.

In Context: A Rite

Photo: A Rite, by 

A Rite runs at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House from October 3—5. Context is everything, so get even closer to the incendiary action 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.

Shidaiqu Nostalgia

by Andrew Chan

For most contemporary listeners, classic Mandarin pop music (aka Mandopop) may be most interesting as a reflection of the seismic social and political changes that rocked the Chinese-speaking world in the 20th century. After all, nothing captures the cosmopolitanism and westernization of turn-of-the-century Shanghai, and that intoxicating feeling of a great city stepping into a new era, more vividly than the jazz and mambo-inflected shidaiqu of the 1920s and 30s, which guitarist Gary Lucas reimagines in his album and live show The Edge of Heaven.

It’s important, though, to remember that these songs carry so much emotional weight for several generations of Chinese audiences precisely because of their lack of social consciousness. These songs are intimate, romantic, and luxurious to listen to—qualities that rendered them unforgivably bourgeois in the eyes of the Communist government, which began shutting down nightclubs and record companies in the 1950s.

When you hear the birdlike tones of a brilliant vocalist like Zhou Xuan, or the alternately sensuous and abrasive alto of Bai Guang, you can understand why these songs are now the object of intense, fetishistic nostalgia. While shidaiqu continued to have an enormous influence on Chinese pop outside of the mainland (particularly in Taiwan, where the legendary Teresa Teng became the principal inheritor of the music’s unabashedly sentimental style), the PRC went through several decades in which nationalistic and propagandistic anthems completely dominated the music culture.

Producer's Note: Hank & Cupcakes and International Blues Express at BAMcafé Live

by Darrell McNeill

We’re starting to get our sea legs back after the annual summer hiatus—lots of faces turning out for the second weekend of shows, lots of energy in the room, and lots of great music played. Wishes & Thieves rocked with equal parts precision and abandon, bringing intense yet lively noise pop to the faithful, the curious, and the uninitiated. Margot B cemented her reputation as one of the more in-demand contemporary R&B/soul chanteuses in the local scene, with a rousing and nuanced set. And week three of BCL carries the momentum even further.

Cedric Watson and Sidi Toure

Wildly popular indie pop/rock duo Hank & Cupcakes makes its BAMcafé Live debut on Friday, October 4, promising vigorous, danceable lo-fi rock. Then Malian and New Orleans music traditions intersect with International Blues Express, pairing acclaimed musicians Sidi Toure and Cedric Watson on Saturday, October 5.

The Rite, Remixed

by Brian McCormick

“I’m a post-modern constructionist. The Nijinsky version would be problematic to modern people.” — Bill T. Jones

When Stravinsky composed The Rite of Spring, he set out to shock. Written for the 1913 Paris season of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the score featured provocative approaches to rhythm and tonality, with transitions that lurched wildly and aggressively between movements. The primitivism of Nijinsky’s choreography and Roerich’s scenic elements evinced the ballet’s subtitle, Pictures of Pagan Russia. The music, likewise, was heavily influenced by Russian folk songs, although Stravinsky denied it. While there may have been chaos in the audience on opening night 100 years ago, The Rite of Spring has  become one of the best-known and most recorded works in the classical repertoire.

Still, to many dance-makers, the idea of doing another Rite of Spring is practically taboo. “I’m a postmodern constructionist,” choreographer Bill T. Jones said. “The Nijinsky version would be problematic to modern people.”

“We come from the dance world,” added Janet Wong, associate artistic director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. “We don’t want to make this.”

This very reluctance opened the way for the creation of A Rite, a collaboration between Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane and SITI Company, under the artistic direction of Anne Bogart. They came together at the University of North Carolina through a festival organized by distinguished musicologist Severine Neff.