BAM Blog Questionnaire: Philip Hulford of Hofesh Shechter Company

Hofesh Shechter Company in Sun. Photo: Gabriele Zucca

Hofesh Schechter Company's exuberant Sun takes the Opera House stage from Nov 14—16. Philip Hulford, rehearsal assistant and dancer originally from Bolivia and now based in the UK, answered a BBQ in the busy days leading up to opening night. Thanks, Philip!

Which artist do you admire from a field other than your own?
Andy Serkis—he is brilliant physically and theatrically. Humble, smart guy, I would love to have the opportunity to work with him.

What's the biggest risk you've taken?
Hmmm, probably the decision to start dancing. Before I even considered dance I was skateboarding, snowboarding, playing video games, and I don't know what I expected from the future!

When I was 17 I decided I needed to get away. I did a Christian kind of bible course with a charity called "Youth With a Mission" in Colorado. During one of the teachings I was completely unfocused and struggled to be present in the class. I was away with my thoughts. One recurring thought I had was to move, specifically to study some dance. I don't know, I just sensed it was the next step... little did I know what a trip God would take me on! Completely random thoughts, but I believed it was the right step to make.

Art Shading Into Theater—Alexandre Singh interviewed by Steve Cosson

Flora Sans, Sanna Elon Vrij, Sanne den Besten, Gerty Van de Perre, Amir Vahidi, Philip Edgerley. Photo: Sanne Peper 

Alexandre Singh's The Humans comes to the BAM Fisher on Nov. 13. Singh, best-known as a visual artist, has taken on no less than the creation of the universe in this theatrical production, based on Aristophanes. He spoke with Steve Cosson, who directed ETHEL's Documerica earlier in the Next Wave Festival, as well as last year's production of Paris Commune by The Civilians.
 
Steve Cosson: What can you do in theater that you’ve never done before? 
Alexandre Singh: This isn’t by any means unique to theater, but this is the longest project I’ve worked on in terms of research and development. Definitely the most fully developed in terms of the script, visual elements, the work with the actors, the chorus, the costumes, the dance. Everything. It was such a pleasure to really be able to flesh out an entire world, and to do so with such talented and imaginative collaborators.

SC: In creating this show were there any aspects of theatrical norms that you were consciously avoiding or working against?
AS: I can’t really say that I’m familiar enough with contemporary theater to know what its norms might be. Not that I’ve chosen to be deliberately naive about it. I couldn’t tell you for that matter what the norms in visual art are either. Sad to say: I spend almost all my time squirrelled away, scratching out my own work. But there are a few what I might term "stylistic" choices that I’ve come across and that I did avoid in this play. I’m not a fan of video projection in theater. I wouldn’t rule it out, per se, but I think it’s quite difficult to reconcile with the materiality of the world on stage. I also much prefer live music and foley to prerecorded sound for much the same reason. What attracts me to theater—and this may seem surprising given the apparent exuberance of The Humans—is its potential to be simple and direct.

SC: Do you consider The Humans to be theater? Or performance? Or is that distinction important to you?
AS: They’re just such broad terms. With regards to The Humans: it’s theater—because, well—it’s a play. Certainly there’s dance and music there as well as certain strong visual ideas that are present throughout. But all of those things are woven into what is at its heart: a quite orthodox piece of theater. Of course when you sit down on any given night to watch it: that’s "a performance."

Water, Great Connector

by Rob Weinert-Kendt

Photo: Simon Kane

Theater is found not only in words and action but also in space—in the way humans move through it and occupy it, the way our physical environment brings us together and keeps us apart. As our contemporary lives have become more isolated and modular—awash in cheap, disposable conveniences and screens everywhere, delivering bits of information, connecting us less to each other than to the means of communication themselves—theater artists attuned to these changes have plenty of fresh material.

Britain’s Filter Theatre seems particularly alert to the way we live now. In shows like Faster and Silence, as well as in freewheeling adaptations of classics, the company has employed a pared-down, seam-showing aesthetic. As co-artistic director Ferdy Roberts describes it, “The idea is that the rehearsal room ends up onstage.”

That’s certainly true of the look and feel of Filter’s intimate but wide-ranging work Water, which debuted at London’s Lyric Hammersmith in 2007, was revived in 2011 at the Tricycle Theatre, and comes to the BAM Harvey from November 13 to 17. A transatlantic mystery with climate change as a thematic backdrop, Water has characters staring into laptops, moving hurriedly through desolate airports, speaking through disembodied microphones, or, if they’re feeling particularly forward, addressing us directly with a slide presentation on the molecular structure of H2O. The world around may be warming, but the world of Water feels distinctly chilly.

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.

Apocalypse 101

by Rhea Daniels

Photo: Jack Vartoogian

For his 21-dancer apocalyptic extravaganza, And then, one thousand years of peace, Angelin Preljocaj takes his choreography to the end of the world. Not satisfied to tell your standard Armageddon tale, Preljocaj drew inspiration directly from the Revelation of St. John the Divine.

Biblical scholar Elaine Pagels describes the work’s final volume as “the weirdest book of the Bible.” As she says: “There are no stories in it or ethical teachings… it’s not what one expects of biblical books on the whole. Basically it’s visions—it’s dreams and nightmares.”

Written approximately 60 years after the death of Jesus, St. John claimed that the visions of war and disaster foretelling the end of the world came to him when he was in an ecstatic state, when the heavens opened up to him and the voice of God spoke to him.

It has been suggested by biblical scholars and historians that the scenes of destruction that John describes are events that would occur shortly after his writing in the first century—things that he could well have predicted without the help of a revelatory vision from God. Going by this explanation, the Apocalypse happened in the First century. The imagery is so adaptable, yet so visceral, that according to many modern artistic interpretations not only has the apocalypse already happened, it is happening and is going to happen.

In Context: Dark Lark

Photo by Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang

Dark Lark runs at the BAM Fisher through November 9. Context is everything, so get even closer to Kate Weare's titillating production 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.

By the Books: Kate Weare’s Dark Lark

by Jessica Goldschmidt

NBA coach and 11-time champion Phil Jackson assigns reading material to his players to maximize performance, enhance personal development, and give them something to do instead of hitting gentleman’s clubs until the wee hours before game nights.

For possibly more dramaturgical reasons, inaugural BAM Fisher artist-in-residence Kate Weare does the same. Weare assigned her dancers relevant reading material during the creation process of her newest work, Dark Lark—though because the show is a meditation on sexual fantasy and the stage as a space for social self-creation, the texts Weare landed on are probably much more scintillating than anything Phil Jackson would have chosen to inspire his Lakers.

Below you’ll find a short compilation of Kate Weare’s non-required reading, with selected quotes to get you thinking about the politics and cathartic promise of desire, the nuances of role play, and the therapeutic potential of sexual fantasy.

An Enemy of the People Primer: The Coming Insurrection

By Jessica Goldschmidt

Thomas Ostermeier’s An Enemy of the People takes some liberties with Ibsen. David Bowie songs, chalkboard walls, empty hipster aesthetics… and a new ending.

Well, maybe not new. But different.

Ibsen’s 1882 play closes with an impassioned speech by his beleaguered hero about the supremacy of the individual over the tyranny of the majority. Ostermeier’s play replaces this monologue almost entirely with text from The Coming Insurrection, a polemic put out by The Invisible Committee in 2007. You can read about the tract’s background and context (and how unfortunately useful it seems to have proven for Glenn Beck) at the informative Wikipedia page. Or, if you’re feeling the need to shake up your perspective on pretty much everything, give the whole text a read for free. (It’s lengthy, but fascinating.)

But if you’re strapped for time and looking for a little insight, we offer a smattering of quotes, and invite you to peruse them and use them to think through Ostermeier’s (and Ibsen’s) work, which runs through this weekend at the BAM Harvey.

Surreal Theater

by Jessica Goldschmidt

Ah, Dada. How you never cease to thrill with your wild and crazy aesthetic antics. And how you manage to endlessly inspire new artists, like John Heginbotham, the inventive Mark Morris protégé and creator of this week’s Next Wave Festival Fishman Space presentation, Dark Theater.

Heginbotham’s work takes its inspiration from the 1924 ballet Relâche, which was, as Frances Picabia's inflammatory magazine 391 proclaimed, an “instantaneous ballet with two acts, one cinematograhic intermission, and the tail of Francis Picabia's dog." Envisioned by the Picabia, a French artist closely alligned with Dada and Surrealism, and with a score by Erik Satie, Relâche was performed in Paris by the notably zany, predominantly Swedish Ballets Suédois. Even the title of the ballet was a good old surreal joke: relâche is the word the French use on show posters to indicate “closed” or “canceled.”

According to this informative article from Performa, the Ballets Suédois was an anti-establishment multi-disciplinary performance company founded in 1920 by director Rolf de Maré, a devotee of Cubism before it sold for millions of dollars and a major bankroller for many of the most influential (and broke) Parisian Dadaists.

Who's Biting Whom? Jaws and An Enemy of the People

By Nathan Gelgud

Set your DVRs! Jaws 2 and Jaws 3 are on cable this weekend (channel 161 on Sunday), and you're probably in the mood for them because you just watched Jaws. We know you just watched Jaws because you just bought tickets for An Enemy of the People at BAM and you're doing your homework.

Oh, did you miss class that day? Let us catch you up.

While the most obvious literary predecessor of Jaws, the movie about the great white shark, is Moby-Dick, the book about the great white whale, another acknowledged influence on Spielberg's masterpiece is Ibsen's 1882 play. 

"Student rush tickets are available!"