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Monday, October 31, 2016

In Context: Pavement





Renowned dancer-choreographer Kyle Abraham makes his BAM debut with a work inspired by, among other things, the 1991 hip-hop classic Boyz N the Hood, W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk, and Abraham’s childhood growing up in the Pittsburgh Hill District. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of related articles and videos. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought by posting in the comments below and on social media using #KyleAbraham.

In Context: Kings of War


Three Shakespeare kings enter the fluorescent-lit corridors of the present in Ivo van Hove’s clever merging of the plays Henry V, Henry VI Parts I, II & III, and Richard III. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of related articles and videos. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought by posting in the comments below and on social media using #KingsofWar.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

A Forest of Threads—Plexus, Director's Note

French physical theater maverick Aurélien Bory (Sans Objet, 2012 Next Wave) Japanese dancer and choreographer Kaori Ito as both muse and instrument in Plexus, coming to the BAM Harvey Theater Nov 9—13. A note from Bory follows.

Kaori Ito. Photo: Aurélien Bory
Once again my aim was to depict the portrait of a woman, not in the ways of a painter, a photographer or a writer, all very superior in the matter, but I brought body and space into play as the sole focal lens. And dance as the first perspective.

Conceiving Kaori Ito’s portrait through the means of the stage has been a whole process. The scenic device was not a concept we started with. Its design has resulted from a long research period, after several weeks of rehearsal.

On the first days, among other ideas and trials, I had a life-sized puppet made; it was a very realistic scale model of Kaori. “Here is your dance teacher,” I told her. Kaori spent many hours observing and mimicking its movements. From this creation model, I kept only the strings and unfurled them into the whole space. The marionette remained in Kaori’s body.

In Context: A Star Has Burnt My Eye



Howard Fishman’s new play tells the recently uncovered story of Connie Converse, a polymathic songwriter in the 1950s who vanished without an audience or album to her name but left behind a treasure trove of groundbreaking home recordings. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of related articles and videos. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought by posting in the comments below and on social media using #AStarHasBurnt.

Friday, October 21, 2016

In Context: Request Concert






A middle-aged, middle-class woman (Polish actress Danuta Stenka) goes about her well-worn evening ritual in Franz Xaver Kroetz’s devastating, wordless 1971 experiment in hyper-realism. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of related articles and videos. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought by posting in the comments below and on social media using #RequestConcert.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Memory Rings—A Giving Tree

Photo: Sierra Urich
By Robert Jackson Wood

The world’s oldest tree is a 5,062-year-old Bristlecone Pine located somewhere—only scientists know exactly where—in California’s White Mountains. The world’s oldest account of deforestation is perhaps in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a 4,100-year-old tale of a man who, among other things, levels acres of cedar trees on his quest for fame.

If the tree could talk, then, it wouldn't tell stories about the good old days. But it might complain about how much worse things had gotten. How to understand exactly what has changed?

It's just one of the questions obliquely posed by Memory Rings (coming to the BAM Harvey Theater, Nov 17—20), the newest work from Phantom Limb Company, led by Erik Sanko and Jessica Grindstaff.

Monday, October 17, 2016

Rules Of The Game—Playing Together Nicely

Rules Of The Game. Photo: Sharon Bradford
Rules Of The Game, a new collaboration between Jonah Bokaer, Daniel Arsham, and Pharrell Williams, is on a program with RECESS (2010) and Why Patterns (2011) at the Howard Gilman Opera House from Nov 10—12. Bokaer answered some questions about ROTG.

Susan Yung: How much of Pirandello’s story/text is present in Rules Of The Game?

Jonah Bokaer: The work is actually loosely inspired by the original text from Pirandello. At the beginning of this creation, I gave each of my collaborators a Pirandello text as a point of departure for Rules Of The Game (also the name of another Pirandello play-within-a-play), which is the play within Six Characters in Search of an Author.

Friday, October 14, 2016

In Context: Rememberer



Architecture doubles as instrument in this compelling collage of offbeat pop songs and live construction from the band Open House, inspired by Henry Miller’s novella The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of related articles and videos. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought by posting in the comments below and on social media using #Rememberer.

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

In Context: Letter to a Man



Mikhail Baryshnikov steps inside the splintered psyche of Vaslav Nijinsky in director Robert Wilson’s staging of the iconic Russian dancer’s diaries recording his schizophrenia. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of related articles and videos. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought by posting in the comments below and on social media using #LettertoaMan.

In Context: Vortex Temporum



Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker returns with a dance meditation on late French composer Gérard Grisey’s spectral 1996 masterpiece. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of related articles and videos. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought by posting in the comments below and on social media using #VortexTemporum.

Monday, October 10, 2016

In Context: Monchichi



Polyglot performance duo Wang Ramirez (Honji Wang and Sébastien Ramirez) employ their signature dance-theater aesthetic in this riveting duet, part of the Brooklyn-Paris Exchange. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of related articles and videos. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought by posting in the comments below and on social media using #WangRamirez.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Playing with Theater

Photo: Géraldine Aresteanu
by Yoann Bourgeois

Minuit (“Midnight”) is a theater show designed by a circus artist. This is an important
distinction; the show plays with the very notion of theater as a concept and as a
physical space.

The show reinvents itself according to the particularities of each theater, with the stage
stripped down to reveal the technical rigging behind it, as if the stage itself is the set. “Playing with the theater” is therefore true in the most literal sense. The emptiness of the space brings the ensuing acts into sharp relief as objects accumulate and pile atop one another on stage. We are left at the blurred boundary between performance and creation. The stage becomes a climbing frame whose composition is part of the show.

The idea of “playing” bridges the entirety of my work. It’s the starting point for my creative process, finding out how to play together. I use the word “play” in the widest sense possible. I like its mechanical definition in French: the space between two objects that allows them to move.

On a deeper level, the idea of play has led me to explore, construct, and deconstruct the physical forces that act upon us—in particular the concept of “non-action,” a balancing of forces whereby a performer reacts to the forces upon them without initiating movement themselves. There is powerful dynamism in that struggle.

What these ideas have in common is that they render a suspension point perceptible. For a juggler, the suspension point is that brief moment when an object thrown in the air arrives at the summit of its arc before it falls. That’s what I’m looking for: the absolute present of that moment. It’s the ideal place—the peak before the fall, that moment of weightlessness, the moment when everything is possible.

Minuit, part of the Brooklyn-Paris Exchange, plays the BAM Fisher through Saturday, October 8. The show is currently at capacity, but standby tickets will be available on a first-come, first-served basis before each performance.

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

A Man of Letters

Mikhail Baryshnikov. Photo: Lucie Jansch
“I am one of Nijinsky’s voices,” Mikhail Baryshnikov commented to a French publication about Robert Wilson’s new one-man-show Letter to a Man, at the BAM Harvey October 15—30. The one-hour play is based on the diaries of dancer and choreographer Vaclav Nijinsky who, despite a short career, left a deep and lasting mark on 20th-century dance. (He created two landmark works of ballet modernism, L’Après-midi d’un Faune and Le Sacre du Printemps.) The fact that Nijinsky’s dancing was never captured on film and that much of his own choreography was lost to time adds to his mystique. Tragically, he went insane at the age of 29 and spent the rest of his life in and out of sanatoriums. The voices Baryshnikov refers to are the disordered identities that collide in his diaries.

Reimagining the Majestic Theater

“I can take an empty space and call it a bare stage.
A man walks across this empty space whilst someone
else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for
an act of theatre to be engaged.”
— PETER BROOK
Interior of the Majestic (now the BAM Harvey Theater) circa 1987.

Monday, October 3, 2016

In Context: Minuit


Acrobat Yoann Bourgeois and his dazzling collaborators capture the body’s ineffable moment of weightlessness while in motion in this series of vaudevillian vignettes. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of related articles and videos. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought by posting in the comments below and on social media using #BourgeoisMinuit.

In Context: Neither







Celebrated choreographer and painter Shen Wei (Park Avenue Armory, 2011; 2008 Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony) makes his much-anticipated BAM debut with this danced realization of Morton Feldman’s 1977 anti-opera for orchestra and soprano. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of related articles and videos. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought by posting in the comments below and on social media using #ShenWei.