In Context: Hagoromo

Hagoromo, featuring celebrated dancers Wendy Whelen and Jock Soto, comes to BAM November 3. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of articles and videos related to the show. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought below and by posting on social media using #WendyWhelan.

BAM Blog Questionnaire: Nathan Boyle of Circa

Nathan Boyle

Australian troupe Circa makes its BAM debut next week with Opus, a jaw-dropping combination of physical feats accompanied by live music by the Debussy String Quartet. Performer Nathan Boyle spoke with us about the piece, its challenges, and more.


How did you get involved with Circa? What is your experience in physical theater?

I saw CIRCA, one of Circa's shows at the Sydney Opera House in 2008. I didn't know what to expect; I knew it was contemporary circus and that was it. After watching that show, I immediately thought "I will work for this company one day." After finishing my Bachelor in Circus Arts in 2010 at NICA (the National Institute of Circus Arts), I was immediately hired by Circa and have been with the company ever since.

How is Opus different from what you’ve done in the past? What can the audience expect to see from you during the performance?

Firstly, the music is live. We have the amazing Debussy String Quartet accompanying us throughout the entire show. This is the first time I wasn't performing to recorded music, so it took a while for me and the other performers to adapt to the slight changes in tempo from night to night as it’s performed live. It’s organic and varies slightly on how the musicians play on the night. The audience can expect to see an absolute fusion of acrobatics and classical music. The quartet isn't just shoved to the back of the stage—they move throughout us, sometimes blindfolded, sometimes with assisted acrobatic lifts, all while continuing to play the music from memory. You have to see it to believe it!

Spike Lee's Bamboozled—15 Years Later

Celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, Spike Lee’s Bamboozled is among the director’s most polarizing works—a furious, uncompromising satire that finds the racist traditions of blackface and minstrelsy in contemporary media. This Wednesday, BAMcinématek welcomes Lee for a post-screening conversation about Bamboozled and its legacy, followed by a nine-film series that explores race and media across a wide range of periods.

Writer-curator Ashley Clark, whose monograph Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled is now on sale, spoke with us about the enduring resonance of the film and the urgency of its contemporary context.

Of all the Spike Lee films you might have written a book on, what in particular drew you to Bamboozled, and were there specific aspects of its critical reception that you were seeking to address or change?

Spike Lee has made a number of very knotty, awkward films that are resistant to a concrete interpretation. When he makes films that don’t go down well with critics, including Girl 6, She Hate Me, and Miracle at St. Anna, I think they’re still always very interesting, with lots to unpack. Of all his films that are not critically acclaimed, Bamboozled is the most fascinating. There’s so much to dig into aesthetically, politically, and tonally. A lot of critics at the time said it was a mess, and they didn’t give Lee enough credit for his deliberate artistic choices, like shooting on digital video, and the seeming randomness of the editing. None of this is by accident, and I wanted to dig into it as a piece of experimental filmmaking and argue for the effects of its technical approach.

The other major thing: many critics said it was unnecessary and dated—that everybody knew blackface wasn’t funny and not politically correct. But Lee used controversial, brutal satire to make the point that, even if we don’t have actual blackface minstrelsy today, a lot of the stereotypes from that supposedly bygone era persist in mainstream entertainment. Maybe it was difficult for people to look honestly at where we were in 2000, and to see that some of these issues were, and remain, in full effect, particularly in institutions, where there is a terrible lack of diversity at gatekeeper level, and what the fallout from that inequality can be, representationally-speaking.

Hagoromo—Taking Flight

Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto. Photo: David Michalek

By Susan Yung

At a recent rehearsal for Hagoromo, Chris Green talks to a group of performers as one man cradles Wendy Whelan, appearing paler than usual and remarkably lank, limbs akimbo at slightly bizarre angles. One of the world’s most beloved ballerinas suffering from exhaustion? Not to worry—Green is the project’s puppet designer, and this Wendy was one of two puppets. And even though the puppets are not in their finished states, the working models feature silicon skins cast from Whelan, including her face, so it’s still a bit unsettling despite the knowledge that it’s a doppelganger.

Life Cycles

In an exuberant ode to life filled with live music, Epiphany: The Cycle of Life (coming to the BAM Fisher November 4—7) sends its audience roaming through labyrinthine tunnels of video, light, and reflection to celebrate the ecstasies of existence. Here, filmmaker Ali Hossaini shares some of the experiences that helped incubate this new multimedia choral work.

On inspiration...

Epiphany came from reflection on mortality. I was with my mother when she died. As she became inanimate, her environment came alive—it seemed almost merciful. The balloons above her bed were talking. The walls breathed. I tried to imagine a world full of grace, a world where everything flows. Guided by spiritual traditions from Tibet and elsewhere, I began exploring her experience with a camera.

When our mothers die, they leave a cord that connects us to the numinous beyond. Every person on the planet grasps that cord, and I wanted to create a requiem that celebrates all our mothers.

In Context: The Exalted

The Exalted, featuring Theo Bleckmann and Carl Hancock Rux, comes to BAM on October 28. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of articles and videos related to the show. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought below and by posting on social media using #TheExalted.

Fresh Hamm: Seeing Eye Screenings—Avant-Garde in 1943

Photo documenting a "seeing eye" screening for the blind, at BAM in 1943.

BAM is known for artistic experimentation, in particular since the Next Wave Festival began in 1983.

But did you know that 80 years before that, it hosted such events as this "seeing eye" screening of the Warner Bros.' musical film, The Desert Song, for residents of the Industrial Home for the Blind in 1943? As the film screened, a narrator described the unfolding events over a loudspeaker system. And prior to the start of the film, audience members received braille programs.

This is one of thousands of photos and artifacts which document BAM's history both onstage and as a cornerstone of daily life in Brooklyn.

The back of the photo with a description of the event.

Real Enemies—Shadow History

Real Enemies comes to the BAM Harvey Theater November 18—22, with music by Darcy James Argue, films by Peter Nigrini, and text and direction by Isaac Butler, who shares his thoughts here.

Darcy James Argue and his 18-piece band Secret Society. Photo: Noah Stern Weber

As of this writing, the Real Enemies team has just returned from developing the piece at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. People know Virginia Tech for many reasons—its unique limestone, football team, and engineering program are all legendary—but more recently, Tech and its environs have been in the news because of a spectacular act of violence. In late August, Vester Flanagan shot and killed two former colleagues on live television in the outskirts of Roanoke, less than 30 minutes from our hotel. Shortly thereafter, he released footage of the murder filmed from his own point of view, and then killed himself during a car chase with police.

Sankai Juku—Cosmic Dance

Courtesy Sankai Juku

By Tanya Calamoneri

Now one of the best known artists in the avant garde dance form of butoh, Ushio Amagatsu founded Sankai Juku—who come to BAM later this month—in 1975 in Tokyo. A cultural councilor at the French Embassy in Japan invited the company to Paris in 1980, and French audiences smartly fell in love with its work. Sankai Juku has booked nearly bi-annual engagements at Théâtre de la Ville in Paris ever since, and splits its time between Paris and Tokyo. The company also tours extensively, contributing significantly to butoh’s global recognition.

Butoh emerged in 1959 in Japan, instigated by Tatsumi Hijikata, whose work was a provocation to modernity in general and specifically to the Western-lead reconstruction of Japan following World War II. In his 1960 essay “Inner/Outer Material,” Hijikata describes his performances as “bodies that have maintained the crisis of primal experience.” His work was grotesque, erotic, inflammatory, and rebellious. Sometimes dancers would flail wildly. Other times, they would stand completely still—though not serenely—held in place like an insect in amber, crushed by images, sensation, and histories. Rather than a specific dance grammar, butoh utilizes images to initiate movement. The dancers transform their sense of time, space, shape, and relationship based on a string of image poetry that propels them to move.

In Context: Refuse the Hour

William Kentridge’s phantasmagoric investigation of time, Refuse the Hour, comes to BAM on October 22. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of articles and videos related to the show. After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought below and by posting on social media using #WilliamKentridge.