BAM’s Global Reach

by William Lynch

Chandler Williams (George) and Kevin Spacey (Richard III) in the Bridge Project production of Richard III.
BAM 2012 Winter/Spring. Photo: Joan Marcus

BAM has long been sought out by audiences from the metropolitan area and beyond as a destination for exotic fare not likely to be seen elsewhere in New York City. In any given season, one might witness dance from Madagascar, Swedish-language drama, film from Yugoslavia, and more. However, there is an important aspect of BAM that is little known to the public, but which is changing the way BAM does business and the way in which the world views this venerable institution. Whereas BAM is well-known at home and abroad as a leading presenter of contemporary international performing arts, it has also more aggressively begun to produce theatrical and other events for its own stages and for export to venues overseas. BAM has bundled all this activity under the moniker of Global BAM to provide it with an easily understood identity that encompasses the broad nature of its potential.

Perhaps the best-known example of this new phenomenon came about in 2008 with the inaugural co-productions of the three-year Bridge Project with London’s Old Vic and Neal Street, which brought Shakespeare and classical theater to audiences not only in London and New York, but also in such far-flung locales as Paris, Beijing, Madrid, Istanbul, Moscow, and Epidaurus, Greece. In keeping with the goals of the collaboration, each of the productions contained an equal complement of American and British actors. The reader may recall the culminating production of Richard III directed by Sam Mendes and starring Kevin Spacey, which played in Brooklyn in the winter of 2012, and which in part inspired Spacey's ravenous character in House of Cards.

The Way We Are/Were: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia

by Keith Uhlich

A man adrift in a film adrift: A spectral fog hovers over the Tuscan countryside as the Russian writer Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovsky), along with his translator Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano, a pre-Raphaelite beauty in modern dress), arrives at an isolated abbey. “Speak Italian,” he insists to his escort, attempting to bridge the first of this haunted movie’s many divides. But something is holding him back. Though he’s here to research the life and death of the expatriate composer—and his countryman from centuries prior—Pavel Sosnovsky, Andrei finds it difficult to connect to his surroundings. The sepia-tinted rural flashback playing under the movie’s opening credits hints at the longings, soon to be explored with maximum surreality, that plague him. He can never quite reconcile where he is with where he was.

There’s another Andrei involved—Tarkovsky, the cowriter and director of Nostalghia (1983). His objective, as he notes in his manifesto Sculpting in Time, was “to make a film… about that state of mind peculiar to our nation which affects Russians who are far from their native land.” “State of mind” encapsulates the experience of this filmmaker’s penultimate feature, a story about borders (of the brain, the soul, the body politic) that tries its damnedest, fool’s errand though it may be, to abolish them. Like his lead character, Tarkovsky had his life upended by Italy. During one of his several journeys there, he and Nostalghia coscreenwriter Tonino Guerra made Voyage in Time, a documentary about the cinematic creative process—before deciding while filming this project to abandon his Soviet homeland for Europe.

A Russian-English Glossary for Irina Korina’s Chapel

by Brian Droitcour

Irina Korina's Chapel. Photo by David Harper

Irina Korina’s sculptures address the bitter undercurrents of faith and nostalgia—the frustration that comes with longing for things that can never be seen or touched. She uses monumentality to conjure the grandness of collective belief, but she emphasizes the imposing inhumanity of monuments by making walls without openings and blocked lines of sight. Korina’s Chapel mimics the shape of a church but she has broken the church into components and replaced them with rhyming forms from everyday life, to locate the germ of transcendent belief in the ordinary, material experience of space and time.

While Korina intentionally makes confusion and frustration a part of the viewer’s experience, she also depends on her audience’s familiarity with her visual and formal references. Since many of them are particular to the Russian context, we offer this glossary to remove at least one layer of opacity from Chapel.

What's cooking for Eat, Drink & Be Literary with Keith Gessen?

by Jessica Goldschmidt

Keith Gessen illustration by Nathan Gelgud

In preparation for tomorrow’s Eat, Drink & Be Literary event with Keith Gessen (founding editor of n+1) and his sister Masha Gessen (author of The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin), we asked Keith a bit about his Russian background, literary preferences, and his and Masha’s sibling dynamics.

Where are you from and where do you live?
I was born in Moscow and grew up outside of Boston. I've lived in Brooklyn since 2005, first in Prospect Heights, now in Bed-Stuy.

What are you reading right now?
This isn't always the case, but right now I'm reading some books about the 1930s in Russia.