In Context: Beyond Time

U-Theatre’s Beyond Time comes to BAM on November 19. 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 #UTheatre.

Elvis Will Be in the Building

Elvis Costello comes to BAM on Nov 10 to discuss his new memoir, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink. Sandy Sawotka, our Director of Publicity and a self-proclaimed Elvis fan-girl, reflects on how the musician has impacted her life.

A fan is born.

1978: Elvis Costello’s first album, My Aim is True, is released—a musical eureka moment. Filled with anger, frustration, clever lyrics, great melodies, killer bridges*, and punchy, stripped down arrangements, it spoke to me and my friends in a profound and exciting way. We read about him in Trouser Press magazine and bought nose-bleed tickets for his show at the (former) Palladium on E. 14th St. Elvis played for maybe 30 minutes that night and stormed off the stage, we guessed ‘in character,’ and it really didn’t matter. I was hooked.  

Over the course of many tours and many albums, I moved through Elvis’ prolific musical explorations with him. He immersed himself in musical history and mined every style for inspiration—R&B, country, classical, folk, art song, the American Songbook—and I grew along with him. He wrote/performed with Burt Bacharach, Paul McCartney, Aimee Mann, Anne Sofie Von Otter, the Roots, and many other great musicians, creating music that perfectly melded their respective talents. And the best part is, he’s still doing that and I’m still eager to hear every new record. That’s a rare pop music relationship.

BAM Blog Questionnaire: Lindsey Turteltaub of Real Enemies

When Real Enemies comes to the BAM Harvey Theater November 18—22, audiences will be dazzled by hundreds of pieces of found video footage by film designer Peter Nigrini perfectly synced to an original jazz score by Grammy-nominated Darcy James Argue and his 18-piece Secret Society. The remarkable part? Each cue is called live, and there's no click track. Below, stage manager Lindsey Turteltaub explains more.

A technical rehearsal for Real Enemies. Photo: Lindsey Turteltaub

Marguerite Duras: Surviving—and thriving—against all odds

By Jess Goldschmidt

For more than 40 years of French history, Marguerite Duras was a cultural juggernaut. A novelist, playwright, filmmaker, essayist, Resistance fighter, staunch-then-lapsed Communist, and at times raging alcoholic, her personal, artistic, and political foibles captivated the imaginations of the French intellectual elite until her death in 1996 at the age of 81.

In every aspect of her life, Duras embodied a trés Français extremity—an obsession with eroticism, death, liquor, and life. She claimed a powerful sexual connection to her younger brother, Paulo. She left home at 17 to attend the Sorbonne. She worked alongside François Mitterand in the French Resistance, loathed Charles de Gaulle, had a child out of wedlock with her husband’s best friend, and made her living as a journalist for the leftist Observateur until she quit to write novels full time.

Despite the fact that her body of work includes countless plays, essays, and films, Duras is best known as a novelist. Her work was stylistically innovative and definitively minimalist—a fact that led her to be claimed by France’s nouveau roman movement, a wave of novelistic innovation championed and theorized by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Yet Duras defied classification. Her more than 50 novels at times feel like plays or poems: minimal character description and maximal dialogue, much of it written flat across the page, without attribution or punctuation. And most of her works center on female characters, probing their inner lives, loves, madnesses, and—almost especially—fears. “Only the stupid are not afraid,” she once proclaimed.

Duras’ gift for dialogue led her to experiment with theater and film scripts—the latter most notably in her collaboration with Alain Resnais, the classic Hiroshima mon Amour (1958). Yet unsatisfied with her role as a screenwriter, in the 1970s Duras turned her attention almost exclusively to film, working as a director on her own projects. Elusive and often alienating, her film work experimented heavily with image and sound, eschewing all constraints of narrative; she once said her goal as a filmmaker was to “murder the writer.”

She drank her way through liters of wine for every few pages of text composed until she entered recovery in 1982, and triumphantly escaped a five-month coma in 1988. She disappeared for years into a relationship with her muse, companion, savior, and sometime-servant Yann Andréa (a gay man 38 years her junior), then reemerged at the age of 70 with her most successful novel, The Lover, which sold a million copies and was translated into 43 languages. Living on the razor's edge, Marguerite Duras survived—and thrived—against all odds.

Duras' play, Savannah Bay, comes to the BAM Fisher November 11—14. Standby seating will be available on a first-come, first-served basis the day of the show.

Jess Goldschmidt is an artist living in Brooklyn.

In Context: YOU US WE ALL

YOU US WE ALL, the pop opera from Shara Worden, Andrew Ondrejcak, and Baroque Orchestration X, comes to BAM on November 11. 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 #YOUUSWEALL.

In Context: Savannah Bay

Marguerite Duras' play Savannah Bay comes to BAM on November 11. 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 #MargueriteDuras.

On the Hagoromo story, new and old

Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto in Hagoromo. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

By Brendan Pelsue

Hagoromo is one of the most popular Japanese Noh plays, performed frequently in Japan, lauded by modernists like Pound and Yeats, and often used as the representative Noh text in theater history surveys. 

Famous as Hagoromo is, its story is simple, an anonymous 16th century adaptation of a folk tale first recorded 700 years earlier: a fisherman steals an angel’s sacred robe (or Hagoromo) and then, moved by her purity and her suffering, finds the good grace to return it. In exchange, he witnesses the Suruga Mai, an angelic dance that accompanies the waxing and waning of the moon.

This plotting is spare even by Noh standards; it is, in the words of Noh theorist Kunio Komparu, “barely enough for a skit.” But the play’s bare scaffold of a story, combined with its potent thematic dualities (the human and divine, the fleeting and the eternal, the greedy and the gracious), may be the key to its endurance. It is one of the few Noh plays that can be slotted into four of the five genre categories that constitute a traditional full day Noh cycle. It is considered a god play, a woman play, a madness play, and a demon play––everything but a warrior play. It is, again in the words of Komparu, “an excuse for the music and dance.”

This “excuse” may sound trivial, but it isn’t. Noh is a performance form where prescribed music and movement come together to create a sense of yugen, the sorrowful and “profound sublimity” that exists beneath hana, or surface beauty. To achieve this meditative state, mundane perceptions of time and event must be stretched, altered, or suspended. The simpler the story, the more room the form’s techniques have to work.

The dance-opera version of Hagoromo we are creating for BAM does not attempt to recreate those Noh techniques––we’d come up very, very short. Instead, our work, to my mind, has been to take our expertise in fields ranging from dance, to new music, to contemporary visual art, to puppetry, and stretch it over the simple scaffold that has made Hagoromo so enduring.

Hopefully, that will allow us to create a contemporary piece that lives up to another lofty thought from Kunio Komparu: “A Noh play… is not the telling of a series of events but an exploration, an evocation, and indeed a song of praise.”

Brendan Pelsue's libretto for Hagoromo comes to life November 3—8 in the BAM Harvey Theater.

BAM Illustrated: 5 Conspiracy Theories

Real Enemies (Nov 18—22 at the BAM Harvey Theater) explores America's fascination with conspiracy theories through found footage by film designer Peter Nigrini and music by Darcy James Argue and his 18-piece Secret Society. The show draws from hundreds of theories, and we asked writer/director Isaac Butler to expand on five of his favorites, illustrated below.

In Context: Opus

Opus, from the dazzling Australian troupe Circa, comes to BAM November 4. 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 #CircaOpus.

In Context: Epiphany: The Cycle of Life

Epiphany: The Cycle of Life, the exuberant ode to life from VisionIntoArt and Young People's Chorus of New York, comes to BAM November 4. 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 #EpiphanyCycle.