New Old Things: Thank You, Anonymous!

Thank you, Anonymous!

In our last “New Old Things” post we shamelessly asked you to search your attics and look for all things BAM. A few days later we got the following cryptic note in a plain brown envelope with no return address:

Enclosed was this program that documents one of the many Brooklyn “community” theater companies that presented its work at BAM. In 1937, the Gamma Players presented Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

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

Did you know that BAM will fit on your coffee table? It's true.

And did you know that a coffee table-sized BAM could be yours simply by entering Free Ticket+ Thursdays on Facebook?

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This week's prize: a copy of BAM: The Complete Works + VIP access to the BAMbook party for you and a friend + BAM Cinema Club membership

Weekly FTT Recap: BAM to the Future

Marty and Doc gaze into the BAM future.

Last week for Free Ticket+ Thursdays on Facebook, we asked you where you thought BAM would be in the next 150 years. Here are some choice answers:

Clarrisa, a weary traveler, envisioned borough expansion:
“a branch in queens”

But Dave and Kyle had more ambitious growth in mind…
“THE MOON!”

Hilary (this week's winner!) coined a name:
“BAMoon”

Amanda was cool with the moon, but envisioned ways for the audience to enjoy from Earth:
“Holographic Bridge Project. Shakespeare from space!!!”

When BAM wasn’t beaming images of Ethan Hawke and Kevin Spacey to Earth, Joseph reminded all that it would have plenty else to do:
“BAM will be super advanced and fly like rocket ships and shoot lasers and dominate the galaxy”

But the question of the earth vs. the moon didn’t matter much to Ross, since he knew that physical location would soon be irrelevant:
“BAM will be much less a place, more of a state of mind. Much in the way we store our data in the Internet's ‘cloud,’ BAM will be synonymous with culture and how we absorb it from the air and surroundings throughout our daily existence.”

Jacob had similar dreams of an incorporeal BAM, except with post-show dining options intact:
“The BAM building will still have its historic look, but movies will be projected directly to the audience's eyeballs. Then, after the eyeball film, the audience can take their hover boards over to 67 Burger.”

What wouldn’t remain the same, Sean suggested, was everything else: 
“I envision BAM as the last bastion of civilization in a post-apocalyptic world.

Matthew concurred bittersweetly:
“I'd like to see BAM as a shining bastion of arts in a decrepit Blade Runner-esque future of New York. As the world gets drearier and drearier, BAM still stands by offering glistening productions, social commentary by way of art, and incredible events to keep hearts and minds at peace even if things are crumbling both physically and culturally.”

Nothing would be crumbling for Kevin, who chose to entertain the utopian strain: “HD films streaming from neon networks suspended in the air into lush new opulent cinemas with glistening android waiters serving the finest foods and brews.”

Selma, also on board with utopia, put things in more World Historical terms:
“New York will be a city-state, [thoroughly] multi-cultural, […] and BAM will be the equivalent of the UN. [We will be] past the financial period of our history and the end of capitalism[, and] new models will arise in which arts and knowledge will be our major concern. BAM will be the future's Library of Alexandria.”

But all Margaret wanted was faith in sopranos to always hit their high notes:
“an all robot opera in 2161!”

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Brooklyn film, close up and illustrated

While BAM celebrates 150 years of performances, BAMcinématek is comparatively a wee babe—a spry 12 years old. Yet we’re continuously celebrating history—the current and past glories of The Seventh Art flicker on our screens daily—so we’re contributing to the sesquicentennial party by celebrating the county of Kings, and its place in the history of motion pictures (an art which did not even exist when BAM first opened its doors!).

To that end, we’ve commissioned Brooklyn artist Nathan Gelgud, a mustachioed Mets fan with a charming Southern drawl, to create a limited edition poster celebrating 90 years of Brooklyn film history.

A movie lover who created silkscreen prints of Godard and Truffaut films, including a delightful poster for a re-release of Truffaut’s Small Change, Nathan contributes to The Believer and the all-comics newspaper Smoke Signal, and moonlights as a film critic. We encourage you to visit his terrific blog here: http://nathangelgud.blogspot.com/.

So, without further ado, we present you with Nathan’s musings on a few figures connected to the illustration, followed by the poster itself.

This Week in BAM History: Between Sun Ra and Philip Glass

Ad from the Village Voice, October 1969

As the 1960s drew to a close, the varying tastes of the psychedelic hippie and civil rights crusader dovetailed across two nights at BAM. On October 10th, 1969, jazz prophet of the outer limits Sun Ra, and the always explosive if precise poet and dramatist LeRoi Jones (who would soon discard his imposed moniker and become Amiri Baraka) graced the opera house stage at BAM. As if this weren’t enough to glut even the most insatiable cultural epicure, the following night brought an even greater bounty as The Band (known then as the backing band behind Bob Dylan’s breakthrough into electric rock) and the legendary Beat poet Allen Ginsberg took the stage. These two nights in Brooklyn stand as a convergence of some of America’s most radical minds, in what was surely one of the last great near-trysts of a tumultuous era.

Lin Hwai-min and Cloud Gate Dance Theatre

By Robert Wood

Lin Hwai-min comes to BAM from October 12—15 with Water Stains on the Wall, a choreographic exploration of calligraphy.

Photo: Lin Hwai-min, by Chen-hsiang

Lin Hwai-min wears the East well. His choreography—a distillation of movement from the martial arts, ancient practices like Qigong and meditation, calligraphy, and other eastern traditions—combines elements so lyrically and seamlessly that it often seems as natural to the dancers as breathing itself. That would be the easy interpretation, anyway: Hwai-min, “Taiwanese to his core,” has translated that authenticity into works which speak to the essence of the island itself. It’s a lovely idea. But the truth is much more interesting, if far-travelled.

Lin Hwai-min—though born in Taiwan—actually came to Taiwanese culture by way of the West.

“In those years,” he recounts, speaking of the 60s, “the West meant the best. Tours in Taiwan, going to the US and eventually getting a green card was the goal for many young people. Reading Time magazine was a must for snobbish college students. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez were our idols.”

The same went for dance. There was never a Fisher-Price tape recorder playing Peking Opera tunes by his childhood bedside, but there was the classic British ballet film The Red Shoes— which, after an initial viewing, Hwai-min claims to have watched 11 straight times.

Salinger, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald were also on the bill. (Hwai-min was a bestselling writer by 23). But as he recalls, the charm of the West—as least as represented in popular culture—had a shelf life. Disillusionment with the actual West as compared to the imaginary one led Hwai-min to begin reconsidering his preconceptions about the US and, eventually, about Taiwan as well. It was only then that he began looking eastward.

Way eastward. Post-Beatles and Time magazine, and after a whirlwind rediscovery tour around Taiwan, Hwai-min formed a dance troupe—Cloud Gate Dance Theatre—and named it after the oldest known dance in Chinese history. He stowed away the techniques he’d learned at Martha Graham’s studio, favoring movement directly linked to the Taiwanese experience. He had his dancers running through riverbeds, pushing and carrying rocks, in solidarity with the grueling labor of Taiwan’s original immigrant farmers—all to dispense with the cultural imaginary and reconnect his choreography to the bodily real.

38 years later, you can still feel the riverbed in Hwai-min's movement. The surface flows, but a calm, centered core beneath that surface—the wellspring of the meditator—always remains. It's only fitting that his latest work is about calligraphy, another practice so reliant upon the centered body to achieve its elegant, flowing effects.

Taiwan becomes Taiwan only from a distance. The river rivers with ease only over its secret stone. Take a look. And come see the show.

Contact Sheets from the BAM Hamm Archives

Isabella Rossellini, circa 1978

There is something beautiful about holding a contact sheet.

As a practice, the printing of contact or proof sheets began in the 1930s, and they were used as a way for professional photographers to quickly edit a large number of shots, and for amateur and student photographers to study their own work. Many of the photographers working with digital cameras these days (which is to say, most photographers) will instead use Photoshop or Lightroom to make digital contact sheets. But the processes of editing and study have changed in step with technology, and contact sheets as we know them have become a thing of the past.

Free Ticket+ Thursdays: The William Forsythe Edition

Passivity gets you nowhere. Photo: I don't believe in outer space, by Dominik Mentzos 

There are two ways to get free BAM stuff:

1. Lie down on the floor surrounded by balls of gaffer tape and hope that free BAM stuff miraculously falls into a cardboard tube connected to your mouth.
2. Enter Free Ticket+ Thursdays on Facebook.

The choice is yours. Answer our simple question for your chance to win.

This week's prize: Tickets to I don't believe in outer space + a Friends of BAM membership

Weekly FTT Recap: Favorite Things About Brooklyn

"Oh to realize space! The plenteousness of all, that there are no bounds..." —One-time Brooklynite Walt Whitman. Photo by Ken Stein 

Last week in Free Ticket+ Thursdays, we asked you to list some of your favorite things about Brooklyn.
Here are some choice answers:

Keith, seeing the need for green, said…
“the great tree to person ratio”

But Kyle—and with him, Alia, Dilhan, Hilary, Erin, and Elena—saw the need for blue…
“feeling calm under the bigger, darker, quieter, and cooler sky”

Dave said to hell with color and saw only the need for Babs:
“Barbra Streisand [was] born here”

Chiming in from Bedford Ave, we had Agis…
“the hipster girls :)”

Chiming in from someplace where lots of drugs are being done, we had Sarah:
“the BQE, which is like a roller coaster you can off-road on”

Meredith said it was silence…
“It's quiet and the kids only scream at recess”

Tim, too, albeit a louder kind of quiet:
“the disturbing silence of industrial Bushwick late at night”

Patrick, just back from Nicky's, said:
“brownstones and autumn trees and banh mi and sitting outside the main branch of the library smoking [while] admiring Grand Army Plaza as tourist buses pass”

Quincy, reeking of sulfur and Jacques Torres chocolate, reveled in the sense of possibility…
“Brookyln is like a chemistry lab with the entire periodic table. You can make anything here.”

Whereas Beth was satisfied with what was already here:
“BAM, bike lanes, beer gardens!”

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Robert Wilson's Brechtian Legacy

Threepenny Opera. Photo: Lesley Leslie-Spinks.

Tonight BAM presents the U.S. premiere of Robert Wilson’s critically acclaimed version of Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, which will be performed by the Berliner Ensemble—the company Brecht himself cofounded with his wife, Helene Weigel, in East Berlin in 1949. This marks the debut of the renowned Berliner Ensemble at BAM, which will feature Stefan Kurt as Mack the Knife. It is also the 21st production of Robert Wilson’s to be presented by BAM (and it just so happens to fall on Wilson’s 70th birthday). While some may think Brecht’s politically charged theater incongruent with Wilson’s aesthetic, Wilson’s Threepenny has in fact been a long time coming.

In the late 1960s BAM president Harvey Lichtenstein got wind of Robert Wilson, who at the time was living in Soho and developing a sort of commune/theater ensemble called the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds (which was named after Byrd Hoffman, the Waco schoolteacher who had helped Wilson overcome his early speech impediments). Lichtenstein recalled thinking, after seeing Wilson’s The King of Spain at Anderson Theater on the Lower East Side, “I don’t know what the hell this thing is, but it’s really astonishing.” Lichtenstein gave the opera house to Wilson, and in the week before Christmas in 1969 BAM presented The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, a three-hour “silent opera,” and the first of Wilson’s works to appear at BAM.