DanceMotion USA—Mark Morris Dance Group Tours the Pacific Rim

Grand Duo. Photo: Scott Suchman

By Susan Yung

DanceMotion USA (DMUSA) completes a fourth season with one of the most popular and best-known contemporary American companies: Mark Morris Dance Group. Immediately after the premiere of Morris' new Words at New York City Center's Fall for Dance on Oct 8 & 9, the company heads to the Pacific rim for performances in Cambodia, informal showings in Timor-Leste and Taiwan, followed by dates in Beijing and Shenzhen, China. A great deal of emphasis during the Pacific tour will be directed to outreach components, also produced by DMUSA. It's a good fit, as Morris has always related to Southeast Asian music and culture.

Tiny Toones. Photo courtesy the company

Activities in Cambodia include exchange sessions with traditional Khmer musicians, an opportunity to see shadow puppetry; workshops with Amrita Dance Company (Phnom Penh) and Tiny Toones, a hip-hop organization for at-risk youth; a folk dance class with Cambodian Living Arts (a partner in Season of Cambodia in 2013); and performances in conjunction with Khmer Arts at its venue. Among the unique events of note: musicians from Royal University of Fine Arts will give a local interpretation of the music for Morris' piece Polka, and the company's technical director, Johan Henckens, will instruct Cambodians on how to make a portable sprung deck floor, which will then be donated to Khmer Arts.

In Context: L.A. Dance Project

Benjamin Millepied's L.A. Dance Project comes to BAM from October 16—18. Context is everything, so get even closer to the show with this curated selection of original blog pieces, articles, interviews, and videos related to the artists and the production. Once you've seen it, help us keep the conversation going by telling us what you thought below.

Little Fugitive, a Brooklyn indie classic

Little Fugitive kicks off the BAMkids Movie Matinee series this Sunday. Curated by BAMcinématek, the series features classic and independent films not traditionally made for children, but that kids would enjoy. With an impact beyond cinema, these films have helped shape American culture. 

by Josh Cabat

What was the first example of a successful independent film in America?

Many historians and critics give the nod, at least in films of the sound era, to John Cassavetes’ Shadows from 1960. While there is no doubt about that film’s artistic and historical significance, a closer look reveals that the honor might much more appropriately be bestowed on Morris Engel’s basement-budget masterpiece, 1953’s Little Fugitive. Engel, who was born in Brooklyn, had come up through the ranks of New York’s Photo League and became interested in film under the tutelage of the legendary filmmaker and photographer Paul Strand. Profoundly influenced by the Italian neo-realist movement of the mid-1940’s, Engel, using non-professional actors, a camera rig of his own invention and post-production sound dubbing in the tradition of Rossellini and De Sica, created an unfettered, almost documentary style of visual storytelling. Not only is this the first great American indie film, then; it is also a bridge between Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave that followed. In fact, François Truffaut stated many times that without Engel’s work (which also includes 1956’s Lovers and Lollipops and 1960’s Weddings and Babies), the Nouvelle Vague might never have existed at all.

In Context: Wild Grass

Beijing Dance Theater's Wild Grass comes to BAM  from October 15—18. Context is everything, so get even closer to the show with this curated selection of original blog pieces, articles, interviews, and videos related to the artists and the production. Once you've seen it, help us keep the conversation going by telling us what you thought below.

Watch Your Step!

Wild Grass. Photo: Han Jiang

By David Hsieh

Being a performer is not easy. You have to remember your lines, your notes, or the movement. You have to watch out for light and sound cues. You have to pay attention to your co-performers onstage or in the pit. You have to be conscious of the audience. But for some über adventurous artists at BAM, these are not enough. They present another challenge—to themselves and to BAM's production team. They put unusual materials on the stage surface for the performers to navigate.

In Pina Bausch’s Arien (1985), Vollmond (2010), and Canadian Opera Company’s Nightingale and Other Short Fables (2011) directed by Robert Lepage, waterproofing and plumbing were required to turn the Opera House stage into a wading pool for performers to dance, slip 'n' slide, row gondolas, and sing in. Bausch also covered the stage with dirt in Rite of Spring (1984) and Gebirge (1985), concrete blocks in Palermo, Palermo (1991), and flowers in both Nelken (1988) and Der Fensterputzer (1997). (In contrast, the upcoming Kontakthof, set in a gymnasium, is relatively spartan.) In Happy Days (2008) Fiona Shaw was buried up to her waist in a mound of earth.

Marth Clarke’s Endangered Species (1990) used a straw-covered floor to help all the animals, including a baby elephant, feel comfortable. In Sasha Waltz’s Gezeiten (2010) the floor was dismantled during the performance as the walls caught fire.

This season adds to this unusual tradition. Three productions use unusual floors—all unique in their own way.

Remembering Fred Ho—a note from Darrell McNeill

by Darrell McNeill

Fred Ho performing at The Sweet Science Suite (2013 Next Wave Festival)

Fred Ho is my friend and he is no longer on this plane and I don’t know if I will ever reconcile that. There is something intrinsically counter-intuitive about someone with that much creativity and industry simply ceasing to be—like a hurricane instantly dissipating into a placid sea.

It makes no sense—a maelstrom just doesn’t evaporate into thin air…

And yet, here we are. Fred Wei-han Houn, jazz baritone saxophonist, composer, bandleader, playwright, writer, choreographer, professor, and Marxist social activist with a body of work so expansive it probably deserves its own arts center, is no longer here to challenge us, overwhelm us, frustrate us, perplex us and, ultimately, astound us. It’s inconceivable one could take genius that ambitious for granted, but, like I said, here we are…

Now we try to decipher the man and his work after the fact. This is no less daunting a task than when Fred was here. Besides the sheer volume and scope, Fred was fundamentally opposed to retrospective. He never looked in the rear view. His eyes were innately trained forward, on the here and now and the future. I conjecture this was the hardest reality for Fred to come to terms with: mortality stripping away the future and the only thing in sight is the finish line.

Lisa Dwan—Strapped In, Babbling Away

Director Walter Asmus and Lisa Dwan in rehearsal. Photo by John Haynes

Lisa Dwan first performed Not I in 2005 in a production directed by Nathalie Abrahami at London’s Battersea Arts Centre, and subsequently worked with Billie Whitelaw, who originated the role under Samuel Beckett’s direction. Following are excerpts of Dwan’s thoughts on preparing for the demanding performance with Whitelaw and director Walter Asmus, and on Beckett, adapted from a BBC interview done in September 2014.

by Lisa Dwan

Few know what it is to have your entire nervous system splayed open like that, Few know what it is to be suspended in that darkness, let alone the hideous difficulty of learning a text such as Not I, and to go on to perform one of the most difficult pieces ever devised. But there is one. One who knew more than most.

I met Billie Whitelaw in 2006 a few months after my first performance of Not I in London. Edward Beckett attended one of those performances and over a Guinness with me afterwards suggested it might be finally worthwhile to meet her “…now that I’d found my own way.”

And as luck would have it a few weeks after that the BBC put us in touch for an in-conversation piece about the role.

BAM and Thomas Edison Light Up the Stage

by Bree Midavaine

Excelsior poster, from the Prints & Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.

On the fourth anniversary of Thomas Alva Edison’s first public demonstration of the incandescent light bulb, the amazing spectacle Excelsior came to BAM. Audiences were able to see the show from December 31, 1883 to January 5, 1884, after its successful run at Niblo’s Garden. The summer before the New York City premiere of the production, Imre and Bolossy Kiralfy consulted with Edison to find a way to incorporate the electric lightbulb into the production's finale; a celebration of the past century’s technological advances culminating in the victory of the heroine, Light (the embodiment of scientific progress), over the villain, Darkness.

Designed by Edison and the Kiralfy brothers, the ballet “was brilliantly illuminated by more than five hundred light bulbs, which were attached to the costumes of dozens of dancers and to the scenery, a representation of the new Brooklyn Bridge. Each chorus girl was also given an electric wand with a small bulb at the tip.” Batteries sewn into the dancer’s corsets powered both the wands and costumes. The Kiralfys' daring partnership with Edison changed the future of stage lighting, costuming, and set design. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle “believed that in Excelsior the limits of ballet spectacle have been reached. It is certain that no grander production has ever been attempted, and it may be added, carried to a successful conclusion, in this country.”

Brooklyn Daily Eagle Advertisement for Excelsior, 1883.

BAM Blog Questionnaire: Julius von Bismarck of QUANTUM

Julius von Bismarck is a German artist known for harnessing technology in creative and thought-provoking ways. He has quickly gained attention for engaging art in public spaces, and won the top prize at the Ars Electronica festival in 2008 for a device he called the Image Fulgurator, a hacked camera that injected stealth images into other people’s photos. For Public Face I, he mounted a giant neon smiley face in Berlin that changed expressions based on an estimate of the city’s mood, drawn from algorithms that analyzed people's faces on the street.

In 2012, von Bismarck took part in Collide@CERN, a two-month artist residency at the CERN particle physics lab in Geneva, where he worked with theoretical physicist James Wells on his lumino-kinetic installation Versuch Unter Kreisen. Choreographer Gilles Jobin was also a resident artist at CERN at the time and collaborated with von Bismarck on QUANTUM (at BAM Fisher Oct 2—4), in which the lumino-kinetic installation interacts with the choreography.

Julius von Bismarck and Gilles Jobin by Grégory Batardon

In Context: Moment Marigold

Jodi Melnick's Moment Marigold runs at BAM Fisher from October 8—11. Context is everything, so get even closer to the show with this curated selection of original blog pieces, articles, interviews, and videos related to the production. Once you've seen it, help us keep the conversation going by telling us what you thought below.