Akram Khan's Stolen Memories

The following is an essay from 2011 that was included in BAM: The Complete Works, an overview of BAM's history. Akram Khan is a dancer and choreographer who returns to BAM March 2—5 with Torobaka, a collaboration with flamenco dancer Israel Galván.

BAM Majestic/Harvey Theater, 2003. Photo: Ned Witrogen

By Akram Khan

Winter, 27 years ago, I entered through the front door of the Majestic Theater—renamed the Harvey in 1999 in honor of Harvey Lichtenstein—then a young actor in Peter Brook’s production of  The Mahabharata. I was 14 years old and immediately quite disorientated by the unfinished demeanor of the building. Of course, my naiveté lead me to believe that maybe the builders, decorators, and electricians had not finished refurbishing the interior and exterior for our big opening night. But then I asked one of the actors, who impatiently told me: “This is it.” From then on, I decided to make the place my friend. If I was going to spend three months here, then I would make it my home. So all throughout the rehearsal period, I started to explore every corner, passageway, closet, and even the overhead walkways, which had access to the lighting rig high above the stage. I probably knew the layout better than the caretakers. And for the next few months, this place became my imagined, magical world.

A Love Letter to BAM

This January, playwright, collagist, and Richard B. Fisher Next Wave Award recipient Charles Mee returns to BAM for a fourth time with The Glory of the World. Here—in an excerpt from 2011's BAM: The Complete Works—Mee shares dynamic memories of America's oldest performing arts center:

Mee's The Glory of the World comes to BAM Jan 16—Feb 6. Photo: Bill Brymer

By Charles Mee

We live in a world these days where it’s taken for granted that BAM is one of the greatest cultural institutions on the planet. And yet, not long ago—certainly within my own lifetime—it was a big old dark neglected pile of stones right off Flatbush Avenue where no one I knew ever thought to go.

The first time I ever walked into the theater at BAM it was completely inadvertent. A friend had invited me to see a theater piece called The Photographer/Far from the Truth, inspired by the work of the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose obsession with animal and human locomotion led to developing a photographic means to project a series of images that had been captured by a set of still cameras: galloping horses, running bison, nude women descending staircases. I knew Muybridge’s work, and I thought it was great, but, of course, I knew no one could make a good theater piece out of it. Still, I went anyway, because I had nothing else to do, and I thought it might be kind of exciting to venture out into the unknown wilderness—and stop for some cheesecake at Junior’s.

Laurie Anderson—Storyteller

Laurie Anderson wrote Landfall for Kronos Quartet (Harvey Theater, Sep 23—27), drawing on experiences from Hurricane Sandy. Projected text is triggered electronically, compounding the stories.

Anderson is one of the first Next Wave artists, bringing her epic United States: Parts I—IV to BAM in 1983, before the series became a festival. Prior to Landfall, 10 BAM performances featured her unforgettable sui generis music-theater, or involved her music. The following is a sidebar which was included in BAM: The Complete Works, an overview of BAM's history.

Laurie Anderson in Delusion, 2010. Photo: Rahav Segev

by Don Shewey

Anytime someone in contemporary culture wants to peer into the future, they usually try to engage Laurie Anderson to serve as consciousness scout. She’s a visionary who can be relied upon to bring curiosity, humor, and intelligence to the question “What’s next?” whether the subject is art, media, technology, spirituality, outer space, the political climate, or the new millennium. She’s a dauntless pioneer who surfs the edge between the known and unknown with a visual artist’s eye, a linguist’s ear, and a storyteller’s tongue, wearing her signature spiky haircut and soft, spangly slippers. She has put a friendly face on the sometimes-forbidding phenomenon we call avant-garde art.

A university-trained sculptor and art historian from a large, affluent suburban Chicago family, Anderson emerged from the fertile, cross-pollinated art garden that was 1970s SoHo to become the world’s first performance-artist-as-pop-star, thanks to “O Superman,” the unlikely hit song from her 1980 performance United States Part II. Its “ha-ha-ha-ha” sampled voice tape-loop has joined the pop pantheon of famous riffs alongside the buzzing guitar of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” or the opening notes of “Billie Jean.” And the accompanying video, album, and concert tours—including the complete four-part United States, unveiled at BAM in 1983 in the second season of the Next Wave series, the first of Anderson’s many appearances at BAM—created a new form of pop performance collage in which DIY graphics, images, electronic sounds, movement, and spoken word could be infinitely recombined, paving the way for innovative art-music-video practitioners from the early days of MTV to innovative contemporary rock-theatrical performers such as Björk and Lady Gaga.

Twyla Tharp—On the Limit

by Susan Yung

Twyla Tharp. Photo: Gjon Mili

Twyla Tharp's new Cornbread Duet, danced by New York City Ballet principals Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild, premieres at BAM on April 10 on a bill with Carolina Chocolate Drops, who will perform live. The following is from BAM: The Complete Works.

Twyla Tharp may have more popular breadth than any of her choreographer peers, though it’s hard to say how she is best known. It could be for her Broadway shows, such as Movin’ Out, for which she won a Tony Award; for the films she’s choreographed, including White Nights; or for the three books she has authored. Or because she has embraced all types of music, from classical to chart-topping pop. What is certain is that she has never compromised on concept, technique, or principle throughout her prolific career.

In her early work from the 1960s, Tharp disassembled, analyzed, and re-created conventional jazz and modern movement, turning it inside out, running it in retrograde. She crafted roiling, cursive phrases that flowed seamlessly or darted unpredictably. It was too technical to be called strictly postmodern, despite the loopy, relaxed demeanor and the dollops of pedestrian movement.

In the 1970s, she began working with Mikhail Baryshnikov—then a guest principal with the American Ballet Theatre (ABT)—who, with a similar compact build, mop of hair, and physical genius, became a male doppelgänger for Tharp. On him, she could satisfactorily combine jazzy, pelvis-swiveling movement with bravura ballet, topped off with his irresistible charisma. She choreographed Push Comes to Shove, featuring Baryshnikov, for ABT in 1976, and began choreographing more with ballet.

BAM Iconic Artist: Bill T. Jones

Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane in their Secret Pastures, 1984. Photo: Tom Caravaglia

Many artists succeed by finding a niche and pursuing it with a singleminded focus. Others, such as Bill T. Jones, experiment in many forms within a broad genre such as dance-theater, and have the rare ability to move between strongly voiced narratives, kinetic poetry, and pure entertainment. It doesn’t hurt to be a charismatic performer seemingly chiseled from Apollonian marble. He founded Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane & Company (later Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company) with his late partner, Arnie Zane, in 1982, after studying dance at SUNY–Binghamton. For all their experimentation with accumulation, contact improvisation, and formalism, basic identifying facts about Jones and Zane (who died of AIDS in 1988)—black, white, tall, short, velvety, precise—provided immediate contextualization, whether desired or not. Their company members also became noted for their widely varying body types and distinct personalities.

Jones once said, “Arnie and I used to feel if you want to be in the avant-garde, really be a provocateur, you take your ideas from the preserved domain and carry them into the mainstream.” Even though Jones later said he had come to favor the preserved domain, his statement certainly resonates in his work’s broad reach. The pair incorporated social issues and narrative threads, collaborating with visual artists and musicians to add even more intriguing layers. One example, Secret Pastures, performed at BAM in 1984, featured sets by Keith Haring, costumes by Willi Smith, and music by Peter Gordon, encapsulating the BAM Next Wave Festival’s spirit of collaboration.

Jones has choreographed dances dense with formal experimentation and lyricism, from poignant solos to the rich group passages at which he so excels. Yet in the context of dance-theater, he is even better known for topical works addressing race, AIDS, cancer, murder, family bonds, and historical figures. One such work, Still/Here, which premiered at BAM in 1994, became notorious for provoking critic Arlene Croce to write about it despite refusing to see it, declaiming it as “victim art” and “unreviewable.” These productions show his skill at storytelling, dynamics, pacing, using space and movement—essentially, understanding what really works in a theater. And capping the pop culture / narrative thread of his career are highly acclaimed Broadway productions—he choreographed Spring Awakening and directed and choreographed Fela! One unerring consistency through this artist’s complex and varied output is his selection over the decades of remarkable performers. Many of his company’s dancers have become successful choreographers, developing their own style and extending a legacy of diversity and experimentation in form and content.

—Susan Yung

This text was excerpted from BAM: The Complete Works. Click here for more information on the book and here to purchase a copy. Bill T. Jones will participate in an Iconic Artist Talk at BAM on Monday, April 23.

BAM Iconic Artist: Steve Reich

Photo credit: Beatriz Schiller

Steve Reich’s body of work reflects an imagination both profoundly curious and disciplined, ranging from studies that use the body as an instrument to large-scale compositions concerning philosophical
issues. Born in New York City, Reich received a philosophy degree at Cornell. At Mills College, in Oakland, California, he studied composition with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud, earning an MA in music. In his early compositions, Reich experimented with tape loops, text, and shifting phrasing, notably in Piano Phase (1967). From 1974 to 1976, he composed Music for 18 Musicians, a hypnotic performance in which percussionists move between instruments, creating an invisible web of movement. “I think it’s effective because it’s coming out of necessity,” Reich said. “It’s not choreography—it’s simply watching a task being done.”

This concept was central to the Judson Church movement, whose performances Reich attended. Around the same time, he also saw Balanchine’s ballets set to music by Stravinsky. “I’ve always been interested in dance and in the relationship between music and dance. I’ve also always felt that what I do is danceable because sometimes while composing, I dance while I’m doing it,” Reich noted. A rich emotional soundscape arises out of his music’s complex, shifting sections, graduated dynamics and volume that shape phrases, and words that dart between meaning and aural pattern. His rigorous compositions have been favored by choreographers who have frequented BAM, particularly Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, who has employed Reich’s work in numerous productions, beginning with Fase, four movements to the music of Steve Reich (1982), which Reich calls a masterpiece. Other choreographers who have set dance to Reich’s music include Jerome Robbins, Laura Dean, and Doug Varone.

Reich’s history at BAM is extensive. In 1971, Reich and his group performed Drumming, and in 1982 he was first presented under the Next Wave rubric. In 2002, with his wife, video artist Beryl Korot, he created Three Tales, a documentary digital video opera about the Hindenburg, the atomic bomb, and cloning. With other large venues, BAM hosted a major element of Steve Reich @ 70 (2006)—a two-part evening with choreography by De Keersmaeker and Akram Khan. Reich—who has garnered a Pulitzer Prize, received Grammy and Bessie Awards, and been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and awarded the Ordre des Arts et Lettres—might be forgiven if he sported a laurel wreath rather than the baseball cap he favors in performance.

—Susan Yung

This text was excerpted from BAM: The Complete Works . Click here for more information on the book. Steve Reich will participate in an Iconic Artist Talk with John Schaefer on Tuesday, March 6.

Sam Mendes on The Bridge Project

Ethan Hawke in The Cherry Orchard (2009), Sinéad Cusack in The Cherry Orchard, Juliet Rylance in As You Like It (2010), Christian Camargo in As You Like It. Photos by Joan Marcus.

“No” is what I said when Joe Melillo asked me to create a theater company for BAM: I had just left as artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse in London and wanted freedom.

“No” is what I said when Kevin Spacey asked me if he should run the Old Vic: too much work.

“No” is what I said to my longtime producing partner, Caro Newling, when she suggested she approach Actors’ Equity Association and UK Equity about a combined company of American and British actors: much too difficult.

That shows you how little I know.

What followed was one of the most exciting theatrical journeys imaginable: the BAM Harvey Theater lit up with flame in The Tempest; an enchanted forest in As You Like It; a haunted candlelit ballroom in The Cherry Orchard; a child’s nursery filled with the madness of adults in The Winter’s Tale.

Ethan Hawke’s Autolycus serenading 12,000 people in Epidaurus under the light of the stars; Stephen Dillane’s Prospero conjuring the spirits on the Champs-Elysées; Simon Russell Beale’s Lopakhin finally buying his beloved orchard in the magical jewel box of the Teatro Español in Madrid; Juliet Rylance’s Rosalind falling in love in Singapore; Rebecca Hall’s Hermione slowly coming back to life in the silence and intensity of the Old Vic; and now Kevin Spacey’s Richard III everywhere from China to Istanbul to San Francisco.

Thank you, Joe, and Kevin and Caro for not listening to me. And thank you, BAM—for being the definition of a great theatrical institution: ambitious, daring, tenacious, brave, supportive, and fun—and for never taking no for an answer.

—Sam Mendes

This text was excerpted from BAM: The Complete Works. Click here for more information on the book.

Iconic Artist Talk: Merce Cunningham Dance Company

Photo: Merce Cunningham, by Annie Liebovitz

We brag on about history and all that, but this truly is historical. Next week, BAM hosts Merce Cunningham Dance Company's final American proscenium-stage appearances—EVER—in The Legacy Tour, with three different programs. The company will disband in 2012.

And check out the Iconic Artist Talk on Thursday, Dec 8 at 6pm, where MCDC's Executive Director Trevor Carlson, collaborators, and members of the company will discuss Merce's incredible oeuvre from very personal standpoints. In the meantime, here's an excerpt from our new book, BAM: The Complete Works, on Merce, written by Nancy Dalva, producer/writer of Mondays with Merce. Be part of the legacy. —Susan Yung

* * * * *

Nancy Dalva on Merce Cunningham, excerpted from BAM: The Complete Works

Merce Cunningham stood at the nexus of classicism and modernism the way Russian-born choreographer Michel Fokine stood at the nexus of classicism and romanticism. Cunningham stripped his choreographic process of all but the essential element of movement, excluding decor, narrative, music—anything decorative or extrinsic. These were later added back, their invention left to others—including John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns—without much, if any, collusion. All but an early few of his 150 works were made in silence. The independence—indeed the primacy—of choreography thus established, Cunningham next began to break down movement into increasingly small increments and began to divide up the body as well. To the lower-body positions of ballet, he added a flexible and dynamic torso; later, he would choreograph for the arms without regard to the lower body, giving them “facings” and directions all their own. The same, too, for the head.

Merce Cunningham and John Cage, How to Pass, Kick, Fall, Run. Photo by James Klosty

Meanwhile, he broke dance out of the proscenium and began to assemble and reassemble his dances without regard to a “front,” fracturing and refracting the stage picture in the way that Cubists broke up the visual plane of a painting. This fragmentation mirrors the breakdown of syntax and the concurrent notions of simultaneity and multiplicity of associations that arose in modernist literature, and in computer coding the breakdown of information into digital bytes. Cunningham was also an early adopter of new technologies, including video and computer programming. All along, his use of chance procedures at some point in the making of every piece was a way to remove some of the effects of personal choice and habit and willful control, and can be viewed as a kind of personal Taoism.

Cunningham was born in Centralia, Washington, one of three sons of a lawyer father and a gadabout mother. He first studied dance with the vaudevillian Maud Barrett, then studied modern dance at Seattle’s Cornish School, where he met Cage; in 1939, at the Bennington School of the Dance at Mills College in Oakland, California, he met Martha Graham, whom he followed to New York. In the summer of 1953, while in residence at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, he formed the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. More than a dozen company engagements at BAM over the years include the troupe’s venue debut in 1966; its first extended season in 1968; Split Sides (2003), with live music by Radiohead and Sigur Rós; and the celebration of Cunningham’s birthday with the premiere of Nearly Ninety in 2009. Two weeks before he died in July of that same year, at age 90, he was in his studio with his dancers, working on something new.

Four Questions for Clara Cornelius about BAM: The Complete Works

The cover of BAM: The Complete Works

Clara Cornelius is director of design at BAM and the designer of the recently published book BAM: The Complete Works.

1. Let’s start with the book cover. Can you tell us a little about what went into deciding on the photo?

The big challenge with the cover was trying to convey the aspirations of an entire institution in one take. We looked at SO many images. Literally hundreds. Ultimately, we felt this image from Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch's Vollmond  evoked the energy, spirit, and singularity of what BAM is. The image is raw, beautiful, and provocative, just like us.

2. It’s easy to forget that, while BAM’s visual identity has been somewhat consistent for the past decade or so, it has well over a hundred years of history and change behind it. While working on the book, what was the most striking thing you learned about BAM design of yore? 

BAM has a really interesting design history. There are some beautiful bulletins from the turn of the century, lovely dance cards with scrolling type (Fig.1), and engraved invitations. But the 80s are my favorite to look back on. There's some great collage work, and some really cool day-glo posters for shows like The Black Rider (Fig 3) and The Cave (Fig 2):

Free Ticket+ Thursdays: The BAM Book Edition

Bastien gets lost in the never-ending richness of BAM: The Complete Works. Photo: The NeverEnding Story, courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

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BAM Howard Gilman Opera House by William Christie

One of the great impresarios of the 20th century, Harvey Lichtenstein, former president and executive producer of BAM, traveled the globe to listen to people he liked and discover people he didn’t know. We were first introduced when he came to our performance of Lully’s Atys at the Opéra Royal of Versailles; he was absolutely bowled over by the piece and wanted to bring it to BAM. Working with Peter Brook, Pina Bausch, or Robert Wilson, and now taking on a 17th-century French Baroque opera, was risk-taking, but Harvey knew his public and he knew about creating an audience for what he liked. So we met and became friends, and decided to work together. “Look,” Harvey said, “we can’t provide an orchestra, and we don’t have a standing choir. What we can provide is intelligence, creative programming, we can provide an audience, and we can provide a venue.” And that was the beginning of a BAM career for me and for my ensemble, Les Arts Florissants.

It was the spring of 1989 when we finally brought Atys to BAM. Coming from Europe, where opera houses and civic theaters are generally in the plushest parts of town, when I arrived at BAM it looked as if I had entered a war zone. Here was this incredible building, this great white elephant, surrounded by little more than parking lots. Once inside, of course, it was heaven. First of all, you have a staff that is one of the best in the world, not only the people up top but the people in and around the stage who actually work with you. It’s a truly wonderful team. And the hall itself is brilliant, with marvelous visibility and acoustics, and the people who go to the opera, who want to see things as well as hear things, are virtually guaranteed a visual experience as exciting as the musical experience.