A Crowd-Sourced Rime

Ladies and gentlemen, there are master orators in our midst.

In conjunction with Fiona Shaw's performance of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's epic tale of supernatural misadventures on the high seas, we put out an open call for readings of a particularly juicy part of the poem, and you answered. Brilliantly.

Submissions rolled in from Malaysia, Antarctica, and Wales, Santa Fe, Portland, and Harlem. Reading styles were just as diverse, tapping into everything from the stentorian to the whispered to the shouted-vigorously-across-the kitchen.

Hear a handful of the voices in our edited version of the poem (above), stitched together from selected readings and animated by our brilliant in-house team. Or browse through and listen to the individual submissions here on Soundcloud.

Don't forget that Tony Award nominee Fiona Shaw, who undoubtedly has the reading of readings, will be inhabiting Coleridge's woebegone sailor until December 22 at the BAM Harvey Theater.

Merce Cunningham for Camera

By Rhea Daniels

Courtesy of EAI

"The use of camera has extended the sense of what dance can be, how movement behaves, and further how we see it. The two media do not compete. Each abides in its own territory.”
—Merce Cunningham

The psychological preoccupations of choreographer Merce Cunningham were not evident in his dances for the stage. In his collaborations for film, however, we can do a bit of hacking into the mind of Merce. At their essence experimental and non-narrative, Cunningham and filmmaker Charles Atlas choreograph the movement of dancers and images that inspired future multimedia artists. Through the dance of camera and human body, a potential filament of narrative could be pieced together. Often in a Cunningham work for stage, though beautiful and incredibly artful, the concept of “What was Merce thinking?” does not even play a part in the experience.

Merce was famous among other things for “chance dance.” Elements of the dance came together through procedures like the roll of dice, for example. In Cunningham for film, we can imagine a different kind of inspiration that is less about chance process. Are those particular scenes of dance and art smashed together just by chance? Watching these films, I wondered, “Is he trying to tell us something that is not just about movement? The locations—a highway, a beach, then suddenly a dance studio, a dimly lit hallway, provide a peek into the larger context of the worlds in which Merce may have envisioned his dances. Whatever storytelling that may emerge is Merce-y in style: delightfully obtuse.

Courtesy of EAI

The Cunningham works for the camera may cleave the closest to Merce’s vision as time goes on. Now that Cunningham and his company are no longer with us, even skilled artists staging faithful reconstructions of Cunningham’s work won’t be able to capture all that Merce intended. And any dancer who has tried to learn a dance from archival video can probably express the frustrating experience of, say, when the dancer they were studying moves out of frame, or an unnecessary close-up on a random body part. The films Merce by Merce by Paik (1978) and Channels/Inserts (1982) are seminal experiments in dance for camera. Everything we see is what the artists wanted us to see at the angle and in the space we are supposed to see it. The filmic transitions cleverly capture the non-sequitors that often characterize Merce’s movement style. Seeing it on film it all makes even more sense. The “meta” experience of Merce by Merce by Paik is dance film strange and wonderful—Merce himself dancing in and seemingly on top of the film, at times. The film is an unconventional work of semi-biography; it’s possibly the most unadulterated Merce we have today.

Co-presented by Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), Merce by Merce by Paik and Channels/Inserts screen as part of Migrating Forms on Sunday, December 15 at 2pm. The screening will be followed by a discussion with artist Charles Atlas and Rebecca Cleman of EAI.

[Corrected December 17, 2013]

Meet a Friend of BAM: Shelley

This month in Meet a Friend, we become acquainted with Shelley, a Prospect Heights local and, it turns out, a whiz with obscure dessert metaphors.

Member since: November 2012

Where are you from? What neighborhood do you live in now?
I grew up in Louisiana, moved around the US and abroad, and now live in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.

If you had to describe BAM to someone who had never heard of us using only metaphors that involve dessert, what would you say?
If reality TV is like a candy bar (and don't get me wrong, I enjoy a candy bar from time to time and almost anything on HGTV) then BAM is like a mixed berry pie. There's a variety in there, but every bite is both indulgent AND good for you. And when you're a member, the pie basically pays for itself (or makes itself)? It's as if BAM becomes your grandmother. The one that makes you put down your phone and engage with the world and then serves you pie to help you cope with the new things you've learned. Thanks, BAMma.

If the world was ending and you could only save one Iconic BAM Artist, who would it be and why? 
Reggie Wilson [whose Moses(es) was at the BAM Harvey last week]. I hardly have to think about it. I saw him perform in his show A Revisitation earlier this year at New York Live Arts and was mesmerized. I feel confident he could tell a creation story to build a new world I'd want to live in.

How far would you travel to see a show or film you really loved? What show/film would it be?
If I could travel back in time, I'd see the live 1977 performance of The Nutcracker with Baryshnikov. I watched the video on repeat as a little girl and if I could see it live, the dream would come alive for me as it does for Clara in the story.

Rime—Casting Nets and Spells

by Stan Schwartz

 Daniel Hay-Gordon and Fiona Shaw. Photo: Robert Hubert Smith

“I’ve found in the last 20 years of performing poems, audiences still love the direct connection of the unmediated human voice. I’m not sure if anything actually will ever match that as being the primary theatrical experience.”

The speaker is famed Irish actor/director Fiona Shaw, and although her voice was indeed mediated by the trans-Atlantic phone system, it still came through loud, clear, and with charm in a recent conversation from London where she was busy directing Benjamin Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia. True, Shaw has recently been directing opera, but she is still mostly known as the superb film and stage actor who, in addition to playing in classical theater (BAM audiences will recall her in the 2011 John Gabriel Borkman), has also made a side business of performing epic poems on stage. In 1996, Shaw wowed New Yorkers with her mesmerizing interpretation of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, and she returns to the BAM Harvey December 10—22 with her performance of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic 18th-century poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The production is directed by Phyllida Lloyd.

Coleridge’s poem concerns the tale of the titular and tortured mariner who kills an albatross which has guided his ship lost at sea, and the strange, supernatural events which ensue as a result: Death claims his entire crew but the mariner is condemned to continue living a life of haunted guilt, hence the proverbial albatross around his neck. The poem features a curious framework in which the mariner has stopped a guest on the way to a wedding and has forced him to listen to his tale. But that is only one of the poem’s many oddities, all open to multiple interpretations. One thing is indisputable however, and that is the poem’s visceral and hallucinatory qualities, rendering it ripe for theatrical adaptation. And there’s no doubt that Coleridge’s rhythms of repeated rhymes give the work an incantatory quality.

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.

Are You As Smart As a High Schooler? Rime edition

by Jessica Goldschmidt

Remember close reading? Thematic analysis? The difference between simile and metaphor?

Sure you do.

In preparation for this week's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (unofficially the first-ever poem in the English Romantic canon, for those of you taking notes), we invite you to pit wits with school kids and see where you fall. Below are a few sample questions from our Rime study guide, which we offer free to every class attending the performance at BAM (the complete and beautifully designed guide is available here).

English majors and Rime ticket holders, it's time to cram. And see how you fare with this sampling of questions. "Fear not, fear not thou Wedding Guest ... "

BAM Blog Questionnaire: Tere O'Connor

by Rhea Daniels



Tere O’Connor has been a major influencer on the American dance scene since the 1980s. He continuously finds inventive ways of creating and presenting work. Next week his company performs the last dance work of the Next Wave Festival with BLEED, the culmination of a two-year endeavor that collapses three of his dance works—Secret Mary, poem, and Sister—to form a new choreographic language. Tere took the time to answer a few Next Wave questions as the company prepares for its debut in the Fishman Space.

What is it about your works Secret Mary, poem, and Sister that made you want to blend and explore their themes in BLEED?

I don't look at "themes" necessarily in my work. I am interested in the specific ways that information accrues in a dance or through a series of dances, constantly blending and braiding potential readings. What rings through from memory as a dance continues? What lasts? How does what one expected to happen in the early parts of a dance hold up at the end? These ideas apply from dance to dance as well. In BLEED I am creating a situation where I can ruminate about this area of choreographic poetics and value it.

Which artist do you admire from a field other than your own?
Pier Paolo Pasolini (one of many).

What's the biggest risk you've taken?
Becoming a choreographer who works with a movement-centered practice in a non-commercial vein. For some reason, dance is perplexing for many, many people. But for me it is an escape from pragmatism, materialism, and a need that some of my fellow humans maintain—to believe there is an order to things. It is a risk because a choreographer who works with abstraction as a generative force needs to walk a fine line between explaining the work against a barrage of misunderstanding or letting the work be and hoping audiences will understand that dance might have other objectives beyond the explanatory.

ABT—Off Center: Nutcracker Memories

Kenneth Easter and Justin Souriau-Levine. Photo: Gene Schiavone

Giant gingerbread cookies? Skiing rats? It’s all part of a dancer’s annual Nutcracker ritual. Here, four Nutcracker veterans share some of their fondest and funniest memories.

Rachel Moore, ABT CEO
During the mid-1980s, American Ballet Theatre performed The Nutcracker at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles for three weeks each December. On New Year’s Eve, ABT dancers would take “liberties” with the choreography, with the idea that it would be a “Nutty Nutcracker.” One year, when I was a member of the corps de ballet and in the Snow Scene, Larry Pech, a member of the corps playing the role of one the Rats, made a special appearance. Dressed in his rat costume, Larry donned a pair of roller skates and ski poles, and went gliding through the snow scene, dodging us “Snowflakes.” It was a moment to remember!

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

Introducing the BAM + NADA Portfolio

by Jessica Goldschmidt

In 1987, BAM began commissioning artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Barbara Kruger to create limited-edition benefit prints. Now, we’re creating a benefit portfolio for the 21st century in collaboration with NADA—New Art Dealers Alliance—which is most definitely not nothing. It’s something. It’s a big deal, actually.

NADA was founded in 2002 as an alternative, nonprofit collective of contemporary art professionals. Together, BAMart—the visual art component of our organization—and NADA commissioned 12 of today’s most exciting visual artists to create a limited-edition print portfolio to benefit both organizations.

The portfolio itself is a work of art, housing prints in a variety of media in a beautiful archival linen folder. Check out the website to learn more about the project and the artists (in alphabetical order): Joshua Abelow, Sascha Braunig, Sarah Crowner, Alex Da Corte, Michael DeLucia, Christian Holstad, Zak Kitnick, Margaret Lee, Sam Moyer, Ulrike Müller, Zak Prekop, and Michael Williams.

To offer a glimpse into the process of these up-and-coming artists, we asked two of the portfolio’s participants (Zak Prekop and Sascha Braunig) to introduce themselves and their work to the BAM community. They graciously complied: