Uniforms Transform into Paper

This week, My Lai—Jonathan Berger and Kronos Quartet's fevered character study featuring tenor Rinde Eckert and Vân Ánh Võ—comes to the BAM Harvey Theater from Wed, Sep 27—Sun, Sep 30. Reflecting on a decisive moment when breaking rank in the name of human decency forever changed the public perception of a war, the piece interrogates the ethics of disobedience in the face of atrocity. During the development of My Lai, the show's creators worked with artist, veteran, and creator of Combat Paper Drew Cameron to generate new visual work inspired by the performance. Below, Cameron describes his process—and what first inspired this transformative creative practice.

Drew Cameron in Iraq, 2003

By Drew Cameron

I am a veteran of the war in Iraq. I entered the military not because of effective advertisements or hero films, not even college money or idealized patriotism. No, I feel that I entered the military because our society needs soldiers and has always found ways to force or entice us into service. I ran guns in the war, I occupied and criminalized strangers and wondered in the summer of 2003 if the people in Iraq would be better off after all of our invasions. Returning from the war I found other veterans and artists and began to make paper from our old uniforms.

In Context: My Lai

Jonathan Berger and Kronos Quartet's fevered character study featuring tenor Rinde Eckert and Vân Ánh Võ considers the line between duty and conscience. Context is everything, so get closer to the production through our series of curated links, videos, and articles. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought by posting in the comments below and on social media using #BAMNextWave.

Performing My Lai

Below, My Lai's Rinde Eckert reflects on the creation of a work wrestling with the repercussions of atrocity, duty, and conscience nearly five decades after an international tragedy.

Photo: Zoran Orlic

By Rinde Eckert

On March 16, 1968, C Company of the United States Armed Forces marched on My Lai, a hamlet within the Son My village complex near the border of what was then North Vietnam and South Vietnam. They killed more than 500 civilians: women, old people, children, and infants. It was to be the first of a series of search and destroy missions called Task Force Barker. Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot, realizing what was going on, landed his helicopter, imposed himself between the berserk soldiers and the remaining villagers, and stopped the massacre. Shortly after Thompson’s irate report to his superiors immediately upon his return to base, Task Force Barker was suspended. It is safe to say that Thompson saved many more than the dozen lives he and his crew (gunners Larry Colburn and Glenn Andreotta) are credited with saving that day.

Tragedies of such magnitude cannot be approached with the brash velocity of the photographic. An almost pornographic nakedness in the document of the atrocity impresses us with its horror at the same time it distances us from that horror—makes it impossible to engage with, to stay with long enough to understand something of redemptive value, something to improve our understanding of ourselves and the world. The broad brush of revulsion paints us into a familiar (and therefore comforting) corner from which we look with a kind of hauteur. We are sympathetic while remaining essentially aloof. “We cannot possibly be that!,” we tell ourselves. The interviews with survivors of My Lai are heart-rending; there are no words… But they are not art. And art is often what we need most when the world has turned ugly and crazy. Documentary history tells us what happened, but art allows us to enter the past fully, to be made wiser by it.

Shining Light on My Lai

Photo: Zoran Orlic

By Christian Barclay

On March 16, 1968, US Army pilot Hugh Thompson and his crew were flying on a reconnaissance mission over the South Vietnamese village of My Lai when he spotted the bodies of men, women, and children strewn across the fields. He nosed his helicopter down and quickly realized what was taking place: American soldiers were killing innocent villagers at will––it was a massacre.

Over the course of a few frantic hours, Thompson tried to halt the carnage. He landed his helicopter between the Americans and the villagers, ordering his crew to shoot their fellow soldiers if they attacked the civilians. He called in support from other air units and together they evacuated a small group of villagers, including a young boy Thompson pulled from an irrigation ditch. Official counts vary, but between 350 and 500 Vietnamese died in My Lai that day.

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.

BAM Blog Questionnaire: Liubo Borissov of Landfall

Landfall. Photo: Marc Allan

Landfall, inspired by the experience of Hurricane Sandy, was written by Laurie Anderson for Kronos Quartet. Liubo Borissov programmed the software Erst used in Landfall—dense projected texts are triggered musically, lapping and overlapping as Anderson spins stories. Landfall is at the BAM Harvey Theater, Sep 23—27, part of Nonesuch Records at BAM. Borissov was kind enough to participate in a BAM Blog Questionnaire.

How did you meet Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet?
Laurie and I first met a few years ago when she was looking for some ideas redesigning her live performance setup into a more compact and streamlined system. In one of our sessions the collaboration with Kronos came up before anyone knew it was going to become Landfall.

What is unique about the software you have designed for Landfall? 

Typically software design has utilitarian connotations of a general tool with some practical functionality, e.g. a word processor, which is not really what I do. Instead, code is more of a means of expression, and the piece of software that is the result is much closer to a custom-built musical instrument or an open-ended score that one has to learn how to play. In that sense almost everything about it is unique because it serves the purpose of bringing a specific idea to life and is part of the work of art.

Kronos Quartet's Unlikely Collaborations

Kronos Quartet, photo by Jay Blakesburg

Few string quartets can claim to have been around for over 40 years, small changes in personnel aside. But fewer still—we'll go out on a limb and say precisely zero, aside from Kronos Quartet—can boast of having commissioned over 800 new works and collaborated with so many artists outside of the classical and new-music purview. Maybe no one told Nine Inch Nails, the Romanian gypsy band Taraf de Haïdouks, Tom Waits, Noam Chomsky, or even Kronos itself that the string quartet was born out of the princely courts of 18th-century Austria and not the postmodern schizophrenia of the shuffle mode. But whatever the reason for their open-minded audaciousness, we're grateful for it.

Add Natalie Merchant, Sam Amidon, Olivia Chaney, and Rhiannon Giddens (September 20), as well as Laurie Anderson (September 23—27) to the list, all of whom are coming to BAM with Kronos as part of Nonesuch Records at BAM. For a little context, here are 10 other Kronos collaborations that have turned preconceived notions of their genre inside out.

In Context: Landfall

Landfall comes to BAM from September 23—27. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of articles, and videos related to the show. Once you've seen it, help us keep the conversation going by telling us what you thought below.

In Context: Kronos Quartet, Natalie Merchant, Rhiannon Giddens, Sam Amidon and Olivia Chaney

Kronos Quartet, Natalie Merchant, Rhiannon Giddens, Sam Amidon, and Olivia Chaney come to BAM on September 20. Context is everything, so get even closer to the artists with this curated selection of articles, and videos related to the show. Once you've seen it, help us keep the conversation going by telling us what you thought below.