In Context: Les Fêtes Vénitiennes

Legendary conductor William Christie and his acclaimed early-music ensemble Les Arts Florissants explore the hedonistic side of the French Baroque with Les Fêtes Vénitiennes, a rarely staged opéra-ballet by André Campra. Context is everything, so get even closer to the show with this curated selection of related articles, interviews, and videos. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought below and by posting on social media using #LesFêtesVénitiennes.

The Mask Is Mine

Photo courtesy Janus Films.

By Ashley Clark

Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (1966), based upon the director’s own short story, charts the fortunes of an optimistic young Senegalese woman, Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), who leaves her nation’s capital of Dakar to work for a bourgeois white family in a small town adjacent to the picturesque French Riviera.

Widely considered the first-ever feature film made in Africa by a black African director, this absorbing 64-minute drama, shot in stark monochromatic tones, resonates equally as a vivid character study and an incisive commentary on the pernicious inequalities of postcolonial power relations between cultures. (Senegal became fully independent from France in 1960, six years before Black Girl, and three before Sembène’s debut short film, the equally unsentimental Borom Sarret, about the travails of a luckless wagoner. They screen together at BAMcinématek from May 18—24.) This postcolonial complexity is reflected in Black Girl’s production history: its hyper-critical screenplay was the only one ever rejected for production funding by the then-head of the French Ministry of Cooperation’s Bureau de Cinema—the key funding body for Francophone African cinema—on subject matter alone. Sembène invented the term “mégotage” (cigarette-butt cinema) to describe the lengths to which African filmmakers went to scrabble together budgets.

Wilde Again

L-R: Charlie Row, Rupert Everett, Cal MacAninch. Photo: Johan Persson

By Brian Scott Lipton

Life is full of second chances, even if we don’t always make the most of them. Take the case of the great Irish dramatist Oscar Wilde, whose reputation never quite recovered after his ill-conceived love affair with the young poet, Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas. Or, conversely, take the renowned British playwright David Hare, whose very play on that subject, The Judas Kiss, received tepid reviews on Broadway in 1998, but which has been since revived to glorious reviews by director Neil Armfield and star Rupert Everett (whom the UK Telegraph says “was born to play Wilde”). This acclaimed production now comes to the BAM Harvey from May 11 through June 12. For BAMbill, I recently spoke to Hare about what inspired the work and what has changed over the past two decades.

What was your original inspiration for writing The Judas Kiss?

I’d admired Wilde since I was 10 years old. I tried to study him at university, but I was told by my Cambridge English literature supervisor that Wilde was not serious, and that if I wrote my final year dissertation on him, I would be a laughing stock. I ignored the advice. I never wanted to write biographical plays but I had always been fascinated by the question of why Wilde turned down the opportunity to run away and avoid prosecution. But I also loved the period of his life after prison when, in exile and with apparent perversity, he returned to the lover who had precipitated his downfall. I decided that making a play out of these two separate, apparently incomprehensible actions would be exciting.

In Context: Henry V

A young king exercises his ambition in the RSC’s take on Shakespeare’s incisive drama Henry V. Context is everything, so get even closer to the show with this curated selection of related articles, interviews, and videos. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought below and by posting on social media using #KingandCountry.

In Context: Henry IV Parts I & II

Henry IV fends off rebellion, Falstaff cavorts at the tavern, and a crown is passed from father to son in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s take on Shakespeare's epic two-part play Henry IV, featuring Antony Sher and Alex Hassell. Context is everything, so get even closer to the show with this curated selection of related articles, interviews, and videos. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought below and by posting on social media using #KingandCountry.

In Context: Richard II

David Tennant (Doctor Who, Broadchurch) makes his US stage debut as the ineffectual king in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s masterful take on Shakespeare’s Richard II, a study of squandered sovereignty. Context is everything, so get even closer to the show with this curated selection of related articles, interviews, and videos. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought below and by posting on social media using #KingandCountry.

BAM Art Auction—Ready: look, click!

Daniel Heidkamp, Vapor world, 2016, oil on linen, 24"x15"

By Susan Yung

The 12th Annual BAM Art Auction will be held online March 16—31, in collaboration with Paddle8 and Bridget Donahue gallery. It’s the yearly opportunity to acquire some amazing contemporary art from a roster of more than 100 artworks, curated with BAM audiences in mind. Proceeds benefit the institution and its myriad programs which range from performances on the big stages; art exhibitions; repertory films and first releases; shows for kids; literary events and classes, and more. The artworks can be viewed and bid on at Paddle8.com beginning March 16; the collection will be on view at Bridget Donahue at 99 Bowery from March 29—31, with a closing party on the 31st.

RadioLoveFest Retrospective

by Anna Troester

RadioLoveFest, a multi-day festival co-produced by BAM and WNYC, celebrates public radio and its community of fans. Beloved programs like Wait, Wait... Don’t Tell Me! and The Moth Radio Hour are presented live at BAM. The festival showcases familiar programs, hosts, and celebrity guests in a theater setting that invites new opportunities and surprises. It returns to BAM for its third year March 10—12, and in anticipation of this year’s lineup, let’s revisit highlights from RadioLoveFests past.

For the inaugural RadioLoveFest in June 2014, the radio programs explored the possibilities of a new format—performance for live audience. Ira Glass and This American Life created an evening of journalism presented as radio drama. Exemplifying this endeavor, Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton, In the Heights) performed in his original 14-minute work, 21 Chump Street: The Musical, inspired by a piece of reporting on a high school student who fell in love with an undercover cop.

Folger Gems

During King and Country: Shakespeare’s Great Cycle of Kings, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s repertory run at the BAM Harvey from March 24—May 1, audiences are in for a treat—rare and ancient artifacts from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC will be on display in the Harvey lobby, including two quartos and two promptbooks. Viewers will also see a video and visual history of Shakespeare performed at BAM through the ages, focusing on the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Macbeth annotated promptbook, courtesy Folger Library and Museum.

By James Shapiro

Coming to the Harvey: Rare Shakespeare Quartos and Promptbooks 

Think of a Shakespeare quarto as an inexpensive paperback. It’s called a quarto because the sheet of paper on which it was printed was folded in half, then folded in half again, producing eight pages (four double-sided leaves). Limited to print runs of a thousand or so, Elizabethan quartos were sold unbound and quickly read out of existence. Few have survived: the first of two extant copies of the 1603 quarto of Hamlet was only rediscovered in 1823 and it wasn’t until the early 20th century that the sole surviving copy of the first quarto of Titus Andronicus was found in the home of a Swedish postal clerk.

Graphic Details: 150 Years of BAM Visual Identity

Image: Detail of the BAM 1995 Next Wave Festival brochure, designed by Michael Bierut

How do you make one thing speak for a place that does many things? And how often should that thing change throughout the course of 29 presidential administrations, two world wars, and the advent of live tweeting?

Most importantly, should it have serifs?

From the 1860s until the 1970s, the BAM visual identity was a motley assortment of styles reflecting shifting zeitgeists and programming. Letterpressed broadsides and hand-drawn invitations for the Civil War years. Civilized neoclassicism for the genteel interwar period. Modernist typeface mashups for the era of Sputnik. In the 1970s, the identity became more focused with the creation of a new logo. In the 1980s, artists and designers like Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring, and Massimo Vignelli offered their creative twists.

But it was in 1995 that famed Pentagram designer Michael Bierut developed the iconic BAM identity that persists today today: the News Gothic typeface, blown up to big scale, and cropped in various creative ways. Enjoy this tour of pre-Bierut BAM visual design, together with a closer look at the way designers have kept his original conception alive into the present.