Helen Lawrence—Dreaming in Art

Hrothgar Mathews and Lisa Ryder in Helen Lawrence. Photo: David Cooper

By Rob Weinert-Kendt

From its contrived sets to its stark lighting, from its stylized costumes to its still more stylized dialogue, vintage film noir has a vivid unreality that’s positively dreamlike, though it’s hard now to untangle whether our films resemble our dreams or vice versa. After all, what did human dreams look like before movies? Like paintings or plays? Or is this the wrong way to peer through the lens—should we instead rightly think of our time’s visual arts as renderings of our dream lives?

Blurring Circus Frontiers

Tabac Rouge's dynamic ensemble. Photo: Richard Haughton

By Roy Gómez-Cruz

The fifth creation by the Compagnie du Hanneton, Tabac Rouge, directed and choreographed by virtuoso performer James Thierrée, is the first of several physical theater performances in the 2015 Next Wave Festival at BAM. The piece, which opens in the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House tonight, explores the porous boundaries between theater, dance, and contemporary circus. With a cast of world-class dancers and high-level acrobats, Tabac Rouge represents the erratic desires of a capricious tyrant through the mesmerizing and whimsical physicality of his people.

Reconfiguration—A Visual Transformation of Music by Other Lives

L-R: Josh Onstott, Jesse Tabish, Jonathon Mooney. Photo: Amanda Leigh Smith/YONDER

By Jane Jansen Seymour

Indie rock band Other Lives brings a cinematic expansiveness to music, and now a team of theatrical designers is providing a setting on stage befitting the sound. Conceived by producer Rebecca Habel and director Terry Kinney of Mixtape Productions, Reconfiguration: An Evening with Other Lives will be presented October 9 & 10 in the majestic Howard Gilman Opera House, as part of the Next Wave Festival. With a format similar to a symphony, ballet, or theater piece, the performances offer an inventive way to experience a band in concert.

In Context: Reconfiguration: An Evening with Other Lives

Reconfiguration: An Evening with Other Lives comes to BAM on October 9. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of articles and videos related to the show. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought below and by posting on social media using #OtherLives.

Antigone, Interpreted

Last weekend, book lovers convened in the seat of justice in Brooklyn to discuss a play translated, adapted, and performed in countless iterations: Antigone, which comes to BAM in a new translation by Anne Carson September 24—October 4. In the ornate Borough Hall courtroom, philosopher Bonnie Honig and playwright Ellen McLaughlin joined performer Kaneza Schaal to discuss the play.

Discussion begins in stately Brooklyn Borough Hall. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan

by Nora Tjossem

Approaching Antigone from a philosophical standpoint, Honig kicked off the event by proposing lamentation as political action—the eponymous character not as martyr, but as activist. McLaughlin introduced the piece as “perfect theater,” living on in such works as The Island, a two-man, play-within-a-play performance of Antigone set in South Africa, and her own Kissing the Floor, an adaptation set in the Depression era US.

In Context: New Society

Miranda July’s New Society comes to BAM on October 7. Get to know July the writer, actor, filmmaker, and distracted meditator with the links below. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought below and by posting on social media using #NewSociety.

In Context: Dream’d in a Dream

Séan Curran Company’s Dream’d in a Dream, a collaboration with Kyrgyz folk music ensemble Ustatshakirt Plus, comes to BAM October 7. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of articles and videos related to the show. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought below and by posting on social media using #DMUSA.

Peggy Jarrell Kaplan: Portraits of BAM Artists (1982—2015)

Mikhail Baryshnikov holding a portrait of Peggy Jarrell Kaplan. Photo: Peggy Jarrell Kaplan, 2000

by Susan Yung

Photographer Peggy Jarrell Kaplan has photographed approximately 135 artists who have performed or collaborated with BAM. In 1984, she had photographed enough BAM artists that Humanities Director Roger Oliver suggested she shoot the complete round of season artists to illustrate the Next Wave Journal. Kaplan also photographed the artists for the 1985 journal. She had two solo shows in conjunction with BAM: Portraits Celebrating BAM's Next Wave Festival: 1983—89 (Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, 1992) and Staged: BAM Artist Portraits (Harvey Theater, 2004).

The unanswered question–how to get to the dark soul of Antigone

Director Ivo van Hove's Antigone, featuring Juliette Binoche and a new translation by Anne Carson, comes to BAM on September 24. A note from the director follows.

Obi Abili, Juliette Binoche, and Patrick O’Kane in Antigone. Photo: Jan Versweyveld

by Ivo van Hove

Antigone, by Sophokles, tells the ancient story of one of Oidipous’s daughters, who refuses to follow the orders of her uncle Kreon, the new Head of State.

Kreon has ordained that Antigone’s brother Polyneikes, who, along with their brother Eteokles has just died in a cruel civil war, should not be allowed a burial because he is a traitor.

A war of words begins with short but razor sharp scenes between Antigone and Kreon: an exhaustive, long, bitter but also passionate discourse of opposing views on how to treat the dead, especially when they are deemed an enemy of the state.

NWF: Next Wave Fashion

Victor Wilde's designs in action during opening night of COLLAPSE. Photo: Mike Benigno

by Chris Tyler

New York Fashion Week might be over, but things are just heating up for this year’s Next Wave Festival. From Willi Smith’s work with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in ‘89’s Secret Pastures (for which Keith Haring designed sets), to the custom Pina Prada bags at the Two Cigarettes in the Dark opening in ‘94, Next Wave artists have a long (and stylish!) history of attracting visionary talent from the fashion world… and 2015 proves no exception.