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BASETRACK Live—Virtually Home

October 20, 2014, 9:25 am
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The Afghanistan war, started after 9/11, is one of the costliest and longest wars our country has seen. While there has been no lack of coverage, unfiltered reports from people directly affected by the war are harder to come by. That is why the photojournalist Teru Kuwayama’s Facebook project Basetrack created so many waves in 2010. It provided a platform not only for marines on the frontline, but also for their families and friends to connect and tell the world what they saw and felt. Those first-hand accounts are now a theater work, BASETRACK Live, created by Edward Bilous and directed by Seth Bockley (Harvey Theater, Nov 11—15). Using words and images culled from the Basetrack archive and interviews conducted by the creative team, this multi-media work features two actors, four musicians, and a cascade of images and videos, telling the firsthand stories of marines and their families. For producer Anne Hamburger, to get it on stages around the country is as much an artistic adventure as a civic engagement. She discusses the genesis and goals of BASETRACK Live.

What are the challenges in bringing this show to the stage?

Anne Hamburger: As BASETRACK Live is a truly collaborative, multi-media piece, it can’t exist as a script on paper. It’s only when the elements come together that you know how they relate. In performances at the University of Florida in Gainesville we experimented with script and structure with the whole creative team. In a second residency at ASU Gammage in Arizona we focused on integrating the technological elements, refining the video, music, and live performance in relationship to one another.

The central characters are AJ, a Marine, and his newlywed, Melissa. Their lines are taken from interviews with them. They face difficulties because of AJ’s war experience. Is their story representative of military couples? How are they coping with having their lives seen by thousands of strangers?

AH: Their experience is typical for young recruits returning home. Many people enlist when they are very young, and then go overseas for multiple deployments, placing real strain on their families. The war also changes people and coming home is a huge, often misunderstood adjustment. This is one of the issues that BASETRACK Live vividly portrays. AJ and Melissa—thrilled and grateful that their story is at the center of BASETRACK Live—attended our world premiere in Austin, and BAM.

Does the show take a stand on Afghanistan war or war in general?

AH: No. BASETRACK Live is about the human side of war. The show focuses on one Marine Unit in particular, the 1st Batallion 8th Marines, and their families. These people and their aspirations and struggles represent a much larger population of people in America affected by war. It is not specific to one branch of the service, nor is it gender or race specific. BASETRACK Live doesn’t sensationalize or victimize the veterans in this story. It shows a truthful, unblemished picture of a group of young men who go to war and come back changed.

How do you think civilians will be able to relate to the show?

AH: It’s difficult not to be moved by the genuine sentiments of the young corpsmen who have worked very hard to earn the right to call themselves Marines. They may be the toughest warriors in the world, but it’s all about what’s in their hearts. BASETRACK Live portrays universal issues. The impact of war relates to us all.

There is an extensive outreach to the military communities surrounding this production. What is that and what’s its purpose?

AH:BASETRACK Live is unique in that it can bring together people not normally in conversation, those who have an up-close and first-hand experience of the war, and those who know nothing beyond the news. The performance gets people talking, and our outreach efforts help make these conversations meaningful and ongoing. One percent of the American public serves in today’s military; many of the men and women are on multiple deployments. It is important to understand what they are experiencing.

BASETRACK Live has a strong music element. What is the function of music?

AH: There is a four-piece band onstage that plays a dynamic electro-acoustic score that runs throughout. The music, composed by Michelle DiBucci, Edward Bilous, and Greg Kalember has tremendous variety. A hip-hop number is embedded within a sweeping cinematic score that triggers a cascade of photographs and videos, filling the stage.

Melissa talks about the importance of electronic communication to connect with AJ. Does the advance of technology help everyone—soldiers, families, the public—formulate a more informed opinion about war?

AH: First, for the photojournalists who took enormous personal risks to document the war, the technology gave them an audience when the major “news” outlets weren’t interested. Incredibly, their website earned five million hits—people seeking hard news from Afghanistan, but also from the families of the Marines stationed there. For Melissa and her contemporaries who have grown up connected by cell phones and the internet, the thought of being completely out of contact is practically unimaginable. But, of course, that separation is a consequence of serving at the frontlines. That’s what made the initial Basetrack project so compelling. It was a lifeline to the families. They were grateful to use social media to connect to their loved ones, and also to find a community where there was support and understanding.


Reprinted from Oct 2014 BAMbill. Photos courtesy the company.
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The Source source material

October 21, 2014, 2:10 pm
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Material for The Source (Oct 22—25, BAM Fisher) was drawn from primary source texts by librettist Mark Doten and set to music by composer Ted Hearne. Four singers housed in a visual and sonic installation bring the work to life with direction by Daniel Fish. The company inhabits a multimedia assemblage of Twitter feeds, cable news reports, court testimonies, and chat transcripts in a multimedia oratorio that investigates media hysteria, secrets, and identity amid digital chaos. Mark Doten provides context for excerpts from his libretto.

The most staggering aspect of the classified materials that Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning leaked is their almost ungraspable scope. They include 483,000 army field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan and 251,000 diplomatic cables; these were released, along with video of a US airstrike in Baghdad, by WikiLeaks and its media partners in 2010.

The reporting at the time focused less on what the leaks revealed about America’s conduct of wars and diplomacy than on the personalities involved. While I believe that the content of the leaks is more important than any individual—including Manning—there are several players who were integral to the events; brief descriptions of them are below. 







PLAYERS

Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning is a US army private responsible for the largest public leak of classified information in American history. She was arrested in May, 2010, and in August, 2013, was sentenced to 35 years’ imprisonment on numerous counts of espionage, theft, and computer fraud, as well as several military infractions. She is serving her sentence at the US Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. Following her sentencing, she made public her transgender status and requested the treatments necessary for her gender dysphoria; these treatments have thus far been withheld.

Adrian Lamo is a former hacker who gained notoriety in the early 2000s for breaking into the computer networks of Worldcom, Yahoo!, and other corporations—he would expose security vulnerabilities, and then offer his services to the companies to help them patch their weaknesses. After hacking The New York Times, Lamo was the subject of an investigation by federal prosecutors. He pleaded guilty to a count of felony computer crimes in 2004, for which he was sentenced to six months of house arrest and ordered to pay restitution. Just prior to her arrest, Manning sought out Lamo online, drawn by his reputation as a hacker, his public support of WikiLeaks, and possibly his sexual orientation (Manning was aware that Lamo is bisexual and had worked for greater LGBT rights in the 1990s). The two engaged in a far-ranging online chat, during which Manning spoke of the leaks, as well as her feelings about herself, her gender identity, life in the Army, US foreign policy, secrecy, and her hopes that her actions would lead to “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.” Lamo reported her to the authorities, which led to her arrest on May 27, 2010, at her base in eastern Iraq.

Julian Assange is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, and was at the center of a firestorm of attention and controversy during the release of the material provided by Manning. In 2012, facing extradition from the UK to Sweden for alleged sexual offenses, he was granted asylum by Ecuador and has lived in the Ecuadorean embassy in London since that time. The material provided by Manning remains the most significant leak in the history of the organization.


LIBRETTO SOURCES

The libretto is sourced primarily from the contents of the leaks themselves (diplomatic cables, the “Iraq War Logs” and the “Afghan War Diary”), and from Manning’s side of the Manning/Lamo chats published by Wired.com. Other sources include tweets from Lamo regarding his decision to turn in Manning, an array of questions that journalists have posed to Julian Assange, and selections from interviews, radio, and social media, drawn primarily from the same time period as the leaks. —Mark Doten

The following are excerpts from the libretto (on the left) alongside the source material [click on the images for a larger view]. See more here.








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The Source: An Interview with Director Daniel Fish

October 22, 2014, 2:55 pm
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by Morgan Green

The first time I worked with Daniel Fish, I was an intern on his production at the now defunct Incubator Arts Space. The full title of the piece was: Tom Ryan Thinks He’s James Mason Starring in a Movie by Nicholas Ray in Which a Man’s Illness Provides an Escape From the Pain, Pressure and Loneliness of Trying to Be the Ultimate American Father, Only to Drive Him Further Into the More Thrilling Though Possibly Lonelier Roles of Addict and Misunderstood Visionary. At one point in this production every evening, actor Christina Rouner would turn to actor Thomas Jay Ryan and dump several gallons of milk over his head. It was my job each night to mop up this milk, scrape away the calcified residue from between the floorboards and repaint the stained portion of the set. I was the milk girl. The play was powerful, the concept strong, the cast excellent, and the mop pungent.

Ryan Hatch, Culturebot writer, aptly described Daniel’s work as “something actually, categorically new taking place... some unfamiliar idea about the theater.” This was true of Daniel’s work then and it is true now.

Daniel Fish is a rigorously inventive American auteur director at BAM for the first time this week with The Source (Oct 22—25). This piece uses the content leaked by Private Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning to WikiLeaks. It is a convergence of Ted Hearne’s music, Mark Doten’s libretto, Daniel’s direction, and video made with Jim Findlay. I had the chance to talk to Daniel earlier this year about the piece.




What is the video component like for The Source?

Daniel Fish: I worked with Jim Findlay on the video. We filmed many different people, maybe up to 100 people—not artists, not actors, just all different kinds of people, different races, class, and occupations, and we shot them watching a graphic video. That will be projected on four screens all around the space. And it’s about 12 minutes long, so you’re watching them watch the video… and if you think about it, it’s not often that you just sit and watch, staring at someone—unless you’re in a relationship with that person.

So, does the video focus more on public response to the Chelsea Manning story than the story itself?

DF: I’m interested in focusing on what he did—what he did, what she did—I say both because when it was released he considered himself male, now she considers herself female. I’m interested in focusing on what Manning did—making this huge amount of material public. (In addition to the videos there were 250,000 US diplomatic cables and 500,000 Army reports that came to be known as the Iraq War logs and Afghan War logs.) How do we look at that material? Have we looked at them? Do you look at them? Have you actually read any of them? I was interested in how we process this information, and the fact that we get all this information in front of a computer screen—where we get so much of our information now—how this is a relationship. In the show, no one is playing Manning.

Oh, OK.

DF: Or, maybe they all are. That’s another way to look at it. It’s more about engaging with and giving musical voice to what happened—the content of the leaks is the text for the piece. In addition to the war logs and diplomatic cables, text is drawn from chats that Manning had with Adrian Lamo, who turned her in. There are some quotes from the press. Some of the war logs are banal, and some are graphic; some are both.

How did that selection process work?

DF: That was mostly Mark Doten. He would select things and then he and Ted [Hearne] would decide what they were going to set. There’s one song, and the only phrase is, “Smoke when bird nears.” And what it means is, there was smoke when a helicopter was approaching. Bird is a helicopter. Smoke when bird nears. And that was a fragment of one of these logs. And if you take that phrase, and you say it over and over and over again, it starts to have a kind of poetic logic to it, and it turns into something else.

It sounds like this project is in line with WikiLeaks’ mission: to disseminate the material. You are sharing the content of Manning’s leaks in a different way.

DF: Well, I think it’s complicated because one of the challenges of making this piece—we’re walking a really fine line—there’s the potential to get cringe-worthy, or icky, right? I mean we’re setting this material, much of it about this very serious, real, tragic stuff, to music, which is inherently abstract, heightened, and entertaining.

That bad word, entertaining.

DF: No, I don’t think it’s a bad word at all, it’s how you define it. But there’s a real tension there, or a risk because I want people to be engaged and I want them to be challenged. In the end, I want the audience’s experience to be a good experience. I love what David Lynch said before a screening of one of his films—he didn’t say “I hope you like it,” or “I hope you enjoy yourselves,” he said, “I hope you have a good experience.” And that can mean many different things, but I think that’s my hope.



How do you feel about being at BAM? Working at the Fisher?

DF: I’m thrilled. I’ve always wanted to work at BAM. I’ve been coming to BAM since, I don’t know, I was in my 20s, and I’ve seen many truly great productions here. I’m honored to be in the Fisher. I knew Dick Fisher and whenever I’m in a building that’s got his name on it, I feel there’s a challenge to do the best work I can do. I felt that way about the Fisher Center at Bard.

Wow.

DF: I do. He was incredibly supportive of me when I was younger and of a lot of other artists too. I didn’t know him all that well, but I think he pushed people, enabled people to do work they had never done before. That was my experience of Dick and [his wife] Jeanne. Chuck Mee’s True Love was the first thing I did with them—Jeanne Donovan Fisher produced and Dick was very supportive—I got to work in a way I had never worked before and on a very high level. That was a real gift. Every time I’m in a building with his name on it, I feel it’s an opportunity and a responsibility to really show up and challenge myself.

I’ve heard you speak about trends you notice in theater—often you are responding to them, pushing against them. Could you talk about any trends you see right now?

DF: One of the things I’m interested in right now is emotion. I’m less interested in banality. I was interested in banality for a long time, in things being real; I think a lot of people in the theater were. And upon reflection, I think banality can at times come at the expense of a kind of emotional reality or drama. I’m also interested in narrative. David Foster Wallace said this great thing, he said, being non-narrative doesn’t excuse you of needing to tell a story, doesn’t free you from the responsibility of needing to tell a story. And I sort of have always hung on to that.

Morgan Green is a Brooklyn based theater director and co-founder of New Saloon.
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Pina Bausch's Kontakthof—Innocence Regained

October 23, 2014, 1:20 pm
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Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch performsKontakthof from Oct 23 to Nov 2 in the Opera House. BAMcinématek will screen a documentary called Dancing Dreams on Oct 27, including a Q&A with one of Bausch's best-recognized dancers, Dominique Mercy. Writer Marina Harss will moderate the talk; here, she recounts some of the dance's storied background.

Tanztheater Wuppertal in Kontakthof. Photo: Laurent Phillippe

By Marina Harss

“When I see them, I see myself,” says the choreographer Pina Bausch with a note of wistfulness as she watches a group of teenagers rehearse in the film Dancing Dreams. The 2010 documentary, directed by Anne Linsel and Rainer Hoffman, chronicles the year-long process of teaching Bausch’s 1978 work Kontakthof to a group of 40 local kids between the ages of 14 and 18. Many of them admit to never having heard of Bausch until the audition. From the beginning, though, it’s clear that Bausch’s approach to art is, equally, an approach to life. “Dare,” coaxes Bénédicte Billet, one of two devoted dance captains charged with teaching the steps and the intentions behind them, “let yourself go.” “I don’t know if I can do it,” a girl responds, fear, embarrassment, and a slight resistance registering in her eyes and cheeks.

The setting of Kontakthof—which translates roughly as “contact zone”—is a dance hall, a large unencumbered space that at certain points becomes a battleground, at others a torture chamber, and at yet others a place of hope and attraction and nascent love. The music consists of sentimental German ballads and tinny tangos from the '20s and '30s. Men and women, dressed in party clothes, pair off, flirt, slow dance, mistreat one another. A girl is poked and jabbed until her eyes spill over with silent tears. Two women dance a sweet, carefree jitterbug in tandem. A couple undresses, with aching slowness, each staring at the other from across the room, giving full meaning to the expression “to undress with one’s eyes.”

Because the dancing itself is relatively straightforward—within the bounds of what is possible for regular mortals—Kontakthof has lent itself to intriguing uses over the years. It has been performed by a group of amateurs from the city of Wuppertal in Germany where the Bausch company is based, all of them 65 or older (2000). It has been learned by adolescents (2008). Both versions were filmed, the first by Lilo Mangelsdorff in a documentary entitled Damen und Herren ab 65 (2002), the second in Dancing Dreams*. More recently, during the season that followed Bausch’s death in 2009, Kontakthof was performed in London by two contrasting casts, one on the eve of adulthood, the other in the twilight of middle age. As The New York Times critic Alastair Macaulay wrote of the former, the “youthful casting often proves unnervingly poignant.” Judith Mackrell, of The Guardian, spoke of the “vivid and often disconcerting chemistry” created by the older dancers.

It all comes down to Bausch’s uncanny ability to draw truth out of her dancers. In the documentaries, one sees inhibitions fall, emotions well up the surface. The dancers are transformed. They seem to grow as people, to become freer and more fully themselves. The power of the piece lies in its universality: our insatiable, greedy, sometimes twisted need to be loved. As one girl says in Dancing Dreams: “the way we treat each other, that’s the issue. Brutality, naiveté… we’re all looking for tenderness.” It’s something we all feel, like it or not.

Marina Harss is a freelance dance and culture writer and translator in New York. Her dance blog, Random Thoughts on Dance, is at marinaharss.com.
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My Sweet Memories of Angels in America

October 23, 2014, 4:15 pm
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by Louie Fleck

Louie Fleck in the early 90s.
In 1993, I was making music in my little West Village home studio and producing multi-image slides for Fortune 500 companies. A good friend of mine told me I should not miss the most important play to ever hit Broadway: Angels In America by Tony Kushner. I went to see the first part: “Millenium Approaches,” and was blown away. I had never seen theater before that was this epic, moving and compelling. A close look at the program revealed that my friend, Scott Lehrer, was the sound designer. The next time I saw Scott, I begged him for an opportunity to assist on the second part, “Perestroika,” which was about to begin rehearsals. As fate would have it, Scott needed some help for a few weeks, so I was hired to work on my first Broadway show as assistant sound designer.

When it was actually time to begin, the show was terribly behind schedule on several different fronts. The script wasn’t finished, and it was timing out long, at about five hours! Instead of having me work at the Walter Kerr Theatre, where the show was installed, Scott sent me home to create some sound effects. I spent some time working with samples and synthesizers to create cues called for in the script as “musical thunder.” This was for the very first scene in “Perestroika,” right after the cliffhanger in “Millenium Approaches.” The angel has just descended from above and Prior Walter (Stephen Spinella) is fighting with what he thinks is a hallucination. The angel (Ellen McLaughlin) reacts by arguing back and throwing thunderbolts. Absolutely thrilling! I created more cues for a few days and presented them to Scott. He thought they were fine, but the next step was to see if the director, George C. Wolfe, would like any of my sound effects.


Now rehearsals were in full swing, and my new job was to sit at the sound table located in the 15th row of the theater, when Scott was unavailable. If the director had questions or desires about the sound, it was my job to get that info to Scott. This was pretty easy, since he asked for very little. The day finally came when my cues were played in the theater for Mr. Wolfe. It was amazing for me to hear these clusters of musical noise bouncing from speaker to speaker at high volume! Mr. Wolfe was happy with most of the cues I created and that was about it.

The best part was watching the cast rehearse. Every member of the cast was amazing! Though I never talked to the cast members directly, I began to feel like I really knew them.

As the show progressed, my job evolved into watching previews and taking notes from the director at the end of the night. On opening night, the show ran over four and a half hours. There were some long delays during scene changes, as the theater was almost too small for all the scenery; it all worked out. “Perestroika” finally clocked in at about three and a half hours. I must have seen “Perestroika” about 20 times (and “Millenium Approaches” eight to 10 times!). It was special every time. New meanings and images were revealed at every performance, and by this point, I don’t think there were any rewrites!

I haven't worked on another Broadway show since then, but I was pretty damn proud when it won the Pulitzer, numerous Tonys, and just about every other award a play can get! I'm looking forward to seeing Ivo van Hove's production at BAM this week.

Louie Fleck is the BAM Hamm Archives Manager.
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On Pina Bausch and Killer Heels

October 24, 2014, 5:30 am
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Kontakthof at BAM, 2014. Photo: Julieta Cervantes


Pina Bausch's Kontakthof is at the Howard Gilman Opera House through Nov 2. We asked Brooklyn Museum's chief designer, who designed the exhibition Killer Heels, his thoughts about high heels and the legendary German tanztheater choreographer/director.

By Matthew Yokobosky

Christian Louboutin. Pumps, 2007. © The Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY
To see a performance by Pina Bausch is always a memorable experience. Even years later, they live on in your mind. You can even describe them to friends, which is unique among avant-garde theater works, because she used set and costume elements that can be easily identified: a waterfall, an enormous boulder, a mountain of carnations, long silk dresses, or high-heeled shoes, for example. It was Pina Bausch’s ability to give those familiar objects a twist of the unexpected that created those memories. 

Going to see a performance where women wear high heels is, of course, not unique. But, I remember sitting at BAM one fall watching her company dance in high heels and thinking about how interesting it was to watch what was essentially a modern dance work, and yet none of the performers were barefoot or wearing “dance shoes.” And it was not ballroom. The way each performer slipped the heels on and off over the course of hours kept blurring the zone between modern dance, ballroom, and in a sense ballet, since the high heels gave the performers an incredible feeling of lift, balance, and an exquisite body shape that can only be created by raising the heel of the foot. I felt that she had substituted the high heel shoe for the ballet shoe.

Pina Bausch's Viktor. Photo: Ulli Weiss
Exquisite beauty though was not always her goal. Pina Bausch liked to also consider the other side. In Viktor, for example, a performer lines the inside of her ballet shoes with raw meat before inserting her foot, lacing up, and proceeding to dance. It's a fantastic example of Pina’s art describing the character’s physical and emotional experience in visual terms—how the torturous physical discipline of ballet “destroys” a woman’s feet, and yet is a necessary requirement to create the physical lines and shapes of ballet.

In the Brooklyn Museum’s current exhibition Killer Heels (on view through February 15, 2015) one could imagine Pina Bausch creating whole characters from different pairs of shoes. For example, Christian Louboutin’s limited edition Pumps (2007) appear to be ballet shoes from the front and have 7” heels in the back, and are likely impossible to wear. You could imagine a character onstage, sitting in a straight-backed chair, putting these pumps on, and requiring several people to help her walk. A non-verbal dialogue ensues.


Roger Vivier. Evening Shoes, 1960.
© The Metropolitan Museum
 of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY
Or Roger Vivier’s purple satin Evening Shoes (1960) for the House of Dior, which evoke some madly elegant evening where people flirt and gesture with cigarettes and champagne, with rhumba music adding atmosphere (see Norman Krasna’s film The Ambassador’s Daughter (1956), with clothes by Christian Dior). Décor, clothes, and especially high heels can set the mood and provoke the story in many of Pina Bausch’s classic and vividly memorable stage productions. They must not be missed!



Matthew Yokobosky is the chief designer at the Brooklyn Museum, and recently designed Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe. Earlier in his career, Yokobosky won a Bessie award for Outstanding Set and Costume Design (Ping Chong’s Brightness).
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In Context: Salt of the Earth

October 21, 2014, 2:00 pm
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Salt of the Earth runs at BAM from October 28—31. 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.

Program Notes
Salt of the Earth (PDF)


Read
Interview
BAM Blog Questionnaire: Zvi Sahar (BAM Blog)
The Salt of the Earth director draws inspiration from eggs, his daughter, and dystopian novels.

Interview
Zvi Sahar (JSpace.com)
For Sahar, being an artist means making something that didn’t exist before.

Interview
Zvi Sahar on Salt of the Earth (Jewish Plays Project)
In Israel, the phrase “salt of the Earth” means “those who give themselves” for the homeland.

Article
What is Bunraku Puppetry?
The style of puppetry used in Salt of the Earth has a history.

Interview
The Art of Reduction: An interview with Zvi Sahar (JerusalemSeason.com)
The Salt of the Earth director discusses adapting a dystopian novel for his miniature protagonist.

Article
The Road to Ein Harod/Salt of the Earth (Midnight East)
“It’s almost impossible to talk about Israel in a work of art without sounding like a barrage of political slogans, foregone conclusions leading to a dead end...But every now and then, someone finds a way to approach the impossible."


Watch & Listen 

Video
About PuppetCinema (Vimeo)
A new concept of performance, combining cinema, theater, and puppetry.

Audio
In Israel, Kibbutz Life Undergoes Reinvention (NPR)
The hero of Salt of the Earth flees to a Kibbutz. Listen to this report on the recent state of the movement.

Video
Bunraku, The Ancient Art of Japanese Puppetry (YouTube)
The puppet in Salt of the Earth recalls this Japanese tradition.


Worthwhile Words

I am putting the hero inside of Jewish texts in order to put him inside of a world where Judaism is just the basis of the world itself, like a fish in water. For instance, the puppet is built from a real military bag from the 1967 war and this is one of the things that was important for me in looking for that material. I wasn't looking to create a puppet that would tell a story about the 1967 war, I wanted to create a puppet that WAS made from the war, that had the story of the war inside of it. —Zvi Sahar

Now your turn...

So how did you enjoy the show? Likes? Dislikes? Surprises? Tell us what's on your mind in the comments below.

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In Context: Six Characters in Search of an Author

October 22, 2014, 2:00 pm
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Six Characters in Search of an Author runs at BAM from October 29—November 2. 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.

Program Notes
Six Characters in Search of an Author(PDF)


Read

Homepage
Théâtre de la Ville
For this theater, the goal “is not to run away from the world [but to] try on a new vision of things.”

Article
On Six Characters in Search of an Author (Yale.edu)
Six Characters plays on the tension between a desire for the perfect illusion and a celebration of illusoriness.

Reading
“Pirandello Confesses” by Luigi Pirandello (VQROnline.org)
The author expounds on why he wrote Six Characters in Search of an Author.

Biography
Luigi Pirandello (NobelPrize.org)
In Pirandello’s plays, “the self exists to him only in relation to others [consisting] of changing facets that hide an inscrutable abyss.”


Watch & Listen 

Video
Six Characters in Search of an Author(YouTube)
John Hurt starred in this television version of Six Characters from 1992.


Worthwhile Words

The split between the “Actors” and the “Characters” in Six Characters seems at first to represent a division between “reality” and “illusion.” Yet, the “real” actors are specialists in achieving illusion, and the characters claim with some justification to be more “real” than reality. Like the modernists who celebrated the power of myth to transform the everyday, Pirandello celebrates the theater, which reveals the element of self-dramatization inherent in the roles people play in everyday life. Although their story contains a heavy dose of melodrama and therefore seems “unrealistic,” Pirandello does not simply treat the Characters with irony. Rather, he seems to celebrate the greater intensity of their dramatic self-representation as the basic impulse behind art. –Pericles Lewis

Now your turn...

So how did you enjoy the show? Likes? Dislikes? Surprises? Tell us what's on your mind in the comments below.

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BAM Blog Questionnaire: Zvi Sahar of Salt of the Earth

October 24, 2014, 1:15 pm
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Zvi Sahar is an actor, director, and puppeteer living and working in Israel. He comes to the BAM Fisher Oct 28—Nov 1 with Salt of the Earth, a story told with puppetry and hand-painted miniature sets combined with live film-making, projected video, and a thousand pounds of salt. Sahar’s creative company, PuppetCinema, investigates the relationship between puppetry and live-action film-making.

Which artist do you admire from a field other than your own?
David Bowie, William Kentridge, Quay brothers.

Which artist do you steal from most often?
Ayah, my 3 year old daughter

Any advice you've gotten and ignored?
“Don’t touch that!”

What's the biggest risk you've taken?
Left an active career as an actor in Israel and came to NYC for three years to explore puppetry. Those were probably the most productive and interesting years I've spent as an artist in my career. Scary as hell, but worth it. The next biggest risk was moving back to Israel.

What food are you looking forward to eating while in Brooklyn?
Ribs at Fette Sau, and a lemon tart and coffee at Colson Patisserie in Park Slope.

What ritual or superstition do you have on performance days?
I used to have a few... Today, I have none and feel much more free. So I guess...having no ritual is my ritual.

What inspired you to create Salt of the Earth?
One day my wife, Daphna, came home with a small blue book and said: “You have to read this.” The book was The Road to Ein Harod and, in a way, I’ve been reading it for the last two years.

Do you imagine the experience of presenting Salt of the Earth in New York will be different from presenting in Israel?
I guess the most significant difference is performing to an audience who has more distance from the story. I’m very curious to see what interpretations people will have in NYC.

How was PuppetCinema formed?
A dinner at my parents house. My mom made sunny-side up eggs and my dad was fixing an old radio. Bringing these materials together (eggs and electronic parts) was the very beginning of PuppetCinema's first show, Planet Egg (which is still running in different festivals around the world). The artistic language of PuppetCinema has developed since that meal, but it’s still very much about interesting encounters of different materials, different media... and trying to bring a synergy to the table… and ensuring that each aspect of the show tells a part of the story and supports it. It all comes together into a good story at the end.
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Birds With Skymirrors—The Last Dance on Earth

October 25, 2014, 8:16 am
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by Brian McCormick

MAU in Birds With Skymirrors. Photo: Sebastian Bolesch




Visionary and provocative, fearless, endless, and beautiful: the work of Lemi Ponifasio requires a letting go of expectations, and having patience to inhabit timeless space; clocks have no place here. His creations transcend genres, mastering a palette that mixes dance, theater, and ceremony, and draws from visual art, politics, philosophy, race relations, history, tradition, and myth. His work has been compared to that of Robert Wilson and Pina Bausch—and in strictly formal terms, he would agree.

What distinguishes MAU, Ponifasio’s community of collaborators from his native Samoa, New Zealand, and the south Pacific, is their transformation of the theater into a ritual space of striking urgency. The name MAU, taken from the Samoan independence movement in New Zealand, means “a declaration to the truth of a matter, or revolution, as an effort to transform.”

“I don’t just make theater for those who love it,” Ponifasio explains. “Theater often deals with the human, phenomenal world. I’m not trying to tell a story. I’m not interested with the superficial, but the cosmological. I’m inviting people to take time to stop and commune in that place—to suspend time, and dissolve space. If you can imagine a garden without flowers, this is what you will experience in a performance by MAU,” he adds. “It is like a Zen garden, where you contemplate your own existence. You are the flower, and you are open to find your own truth.”

Time is stretched and snapped in MAU performances. The usual comforts of spectatorship are challenged, with barely perceptible movement, dark lighting, and mysterious imagery, laced with obscure, visceral verses characterized by sharp, manic activities. The effect is intentional: time blurs when people are faced with a lifethreatening crisis. Our perception slows, clarifies. When things return to normal, there is a rush. A similar heightened state of awareness can be experienced in a performance by MAU.

In Birds With Skymirrors, at the Howard Gilman Opera House Nov 19 to 22, Ponifasio approaches the crisis of climate change and ocean pollution. For him, and the people around him, time has already run out. The title of the work comes from seeing frigate birds flying with videotape in their bills that reflected the sun, on the home island of one of his collaborators. But Birds With Skymirrors is not a lecture to the West about environmental responsibility; it is a karanga, a reflection on or genealogical ceremony of humanity’s relationship with the other living things of the Earth. It is a call to contemplate, not a cri de coeur.

MAU
“When we are sick, we behave sickly. The quality of how we animate ourselves,” said Ponifasio, “is related directly to the quality of our being. I made this work because of what’s around me, because of people close to me, who come from Tuvalu and Kiribati, where the effects of rising seas and ocean pollution are happening now. You think about people you work with, and what’s going to happen to them.”

A manifest darkness physically penetrates the stage in Birds With Skymirrors, a black monolith slicing diagonally from the ground upward. Ash is ceremonially dusted onto the floor, and then danced on—an invocation, or maybe a reflection on the way in which we are walking in the steps of our ancestors. A bare torso undulates softly, like a gentle wave under a dim light, conveying a primal beauty in one moment, and the haunting image of a de-feathered creature in distress the next. Hands flutter, aping wings. Anthropomorphism is inverted, as humans take on characteristics of flightless birds. Film footage of a pelican trapped in an oil slick takes on deeper, closer meaning, in which we now see our own fragility. A naked man with the green head of a bird appears, a god perhaps, and a hopeful hue in an otherwise colorless world.

A disquieting score of water sounds, chants, NASA recordings, and other noises of nature and progress keep the pace, and hurry it along during sequences that suggest alarm at our obsessive relationship with technology. Dark yet distinctive lighting design by longtime collaborator Helen Todd contributes significantly to establishing the low-range perceptual continuum in space that the dance and choreography make with time.

For Ponifasio, Birds With Skymirrors answers the question, what would the last dance on earth look like? Tragically, in some places, it has already happened.



Brian McCormick leads the After School Critical Response program at Baryshnikov Arts Center.

Reprinted from Oct 2014 BAMbill.
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Gabriel Kahane on Sunshine Noir

October 26, 2014, 12:00 pm
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“Los Angeles understands its past... through a robust fiction called noir.”
—Mike Davis, City of Quartz

Chinatown (Paramount Pictures/Photofest)



by Gabriel Kahane


A great deal of ink has been spilled about film noir since its inception some three-quarters of a century ago, much of it flowing from the pens and toner cartridges of critics with credentials far beyond mine. It is, however, a great honor and privilege to have worked closely with Nellie Killian to co-curate this Sunshine Noir festival for BAMcinématek in conjunction with BAM Next Wave’s presentation of my LA-centric piece, The Ambassador, and so I would offer just a few words about noir as I see it: that is to say, as a native Angeleno who’s lived in New York for a bit more than a decade.

As Mike Davis and others have written, noir is often misunderstood as merely a marriage of hard-boiled fiction on the one hand and a certain breed of left-leaning director on the other. But for noir to come to life, the juxtaposition of light and shadow—a binary endemic to Los Angeles—is necessary. Put another way: Southern California’s sunny climate belies its seedy underbelly; put on the screen, that contradiction gives birth to noir.

While all this may be cursory, it’s a useful bit of context for New Yorkers. When the bad guys rear their heads in Brooklyn, it’s not such a shocking contrast to the often rough-hewn texture of urban life here, dominated as it is by concrete, long stretches of bad weather, vermin, etc. In Los Angeles, where unbroken blue skies, palm trees, and the silver screen overwhelm our collective sense of the place, tales of crime and depravity are often made more vivid.

In a Lonely Place (Columbia Pictures/Photofest)

This geographic specificity is significant as it permits the ideologically subversive aspect of noir to speak more clearly. Against Los Angeles’ sunny exterior, its darker criminal life is the contrast dye tracing the circuitous path of capital as it moves from the millionaire to the man in the mug shot, and back again. Philip Marlowe and his ilk, then, are not just riffs on the urban flâneur, but serve frequently as undercover agents of ideology, offering visceral critiques of capitalism in which we can nearly taste the blood and the booze.

In next month’s festival, 20 films spanning more than four decades offer a varied survey of the genre, ranging from the classic Bogart vehicle In a Lonely Place (1950) and the totemic Chinatown (1974), to Michael Mann’s neo-noir masterpiece Heat (1995). In between, viewers will have a rare opportunity to see on the big screen Robert Altman’s brilliant take on Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (1973), starring a typically acerbic Elliott Gould; the Cold War-noir of Kiss Me Deadly(1955); as well as Robert Zemeckis’ irresistible Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), which for millennials probably warrants a sober viewing as an adult for its biting and unexpected evisceration of the LA transit establishment.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Buena Vista Pictures/Photofest)


Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh are represented with stunning essays in neo-noir, Jackie Brown and The Limey, respectively, the latter a winning showcase for Terence Stamp. Alex Cox makes a psychedelic cocktail of postmodernism and magical realism in Repo Man (1984), and William Friedkin’s cult classic To Live and Die in LA (1985) shows Los Angeles at its sun-bleached worst.

What I love about all of these films, aside from their merits as art objects, is that almost all of them serve to counteract prevailing stereotypes about Los Angeles, a city so often dismissed as vapid and materialistic. What will emerge throughout Sunshine Noir may not be a uniformly sympathetic portrait of LA, but it ought to deepen the sense of texture and pathos we assign to Southern California, entertaining and enriching us along the way.

Sunshine Noir runs at BAMcinématek from Nov 26—Dec 9, andThe Ambassador is at the Harvey from Dec 10—13.
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The Object Lesson—an interview with director David Neumann

October 29, 2014, 8:47 am
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by Morgan Green

Where making art is concerned, David Neumann believes that “the free flow of ideas should always be encouraged rather than obeying some hierarchical relationship that supersedes creative freedom.” His track record indicates a healthy disrespect for said hierarchical structure: David Neumann, a choreographer, trained as an actor and is now directing The Object Lesson in the Next Wave Festival.

I caught David on the phone as he dashed between rehearsals to ask about his work with Geoff Sobelle on The Object Lesson. In addition to being a highly sought-after multidisciplinary collaborator, he is also a terrifically nice guy.

David Neumann’s BAM debut was in 1991 when he danced in the Warrior Ant directed by Lee Breuer.



How did you meet Geoff Sobelle?

David Neumann: I met Geoff working on The Elephant Room—I choreographed some sections of that piece. Geoff’s work is so wonderfully disturbing and we seemed to get along very well; that was a very collaborative process. He and I seemed to share some sensibilities right off the bat.

The actors who made The Elephant Room came from an improvisation background, and they're completely comfortable just going with it. So, when I came to rehearsal the first time, they just went into a thing, and I was totally taken aback. I was like, what the hell is going on? I didn’t know there was a run-through going on, and they all had fake teeth and facial hair, and I thought it was completely nuts and really fun. And then I thought, this is a joke, this is crazy, this will end soon, and then we’ll talk about it. But they just kept going. For maybe 45 minutes. And they could have gone all day long. Then it dawned on me—oh, they're working. They’re working.

They were essentially in character and just talking about the show, and then watching each others’ magic tricks. They were showing me, the choreographer, some of the stuff these guys did.

Geoff’s magician was particularly creepy and wonderful. You loved him, but he made your spine tingle in a “don’t let him near children” way—those types of feelings he really embodied.

Geoff Sobelle in The Elephant Room at St. Ann’s Warehouse.
Geoff’s humor is subversive. It subverts your expectations; he really lives for that. Not in an annoying way—in a truly generous way. You know how people are like, “oh yeah, check this out,” just constantly proving how intelligent they are (which is just, so annoying)? He does it in a very generous way. He discovers it in front of you, so you can’t help but be charmed with his ability to go with the flow and find new angles.

How do you and Geoff collaborate?

DN: It’s like tag-team wrestling. We wrestle with it for awhile, then I’ll watch him do it, then I’ll have an idea, and I’ll just get up and show him. We discover together, you know? It’s great for me as a director to go through what the performer goes through a little bit, because I have a much better way of helping them through. That way when Geoff feels like he needs help, he can reach out to me and I have a little bit of experience and empathy.

Will you talk about the idea behind the title, The Object Lesson?

DN: This is really Geoff’s brainchild. The title comes from him suddenly encountering a brand new perspective on all the crap he owns. I think he was in the middle of a move. He was confronted with all these things, and they were each tied to very specific memories, feelings, times in his life, and he found that really compelling and wanted to play with that idea and that actual experience. Some of the stuff he discovered in his own basement wasn’t his—he was finding things with no attachment. He didn’t know what the hell they were.

Part of the idea is that this is an installation—people can actually rummage through boxes of things and think about another person’s life and how it relates to their own, and their own use of objects.

Many of the objects actually belong to the Geoff. I thought it was important that they are not all just theater props.

Geoff Sobelle inThe Object Lesson. Photo: Jauhien Sasnou
What about your own work? How is it similar or different to the way The Object Lesson is being created?

DN: I have a piece coming to Abrons Arts Center in April in 2015. It's similar to The Object Lesson as it deals with very personal events in my life. Both Geoff and I are exploring true events and, in a way, dealing with those events through our work. My piece is centered around the experience of the death of both my parents. The process of dying—I became just fascinated with that.

Formally, aesthetically, I combine a more formal approach with theater-making. I have a container for the ideas in the piece, which is an adaptation and response to the Noh theater of Japan. The structure of it helps give focus to my piece in a way that I find really compelling. Noh theater is already a really beautiful, multi-disciplinary performance art: music and singers and a very specific movement vocabulary. In no way am I trying to imitate Noh; I’m using the structure the shape, and inspiration.

What are some other places that you take inspiration from?

DN: The New York experimental theater, handed down from Richard Foreman, the Wooster Group, Mabou Mines, etc—the concerns about making theater and responding to a complex view of our humanity and our culture resides in my work. I am deeply influenced by that history. And then anyone and everyone I’ve worked with in the past: various choreographers, Big Dance Theater, Susan Marshall… anyone I’ve worked with has had some impact on my work.

My parents were members of Mabou Mine’s company, and it wasn’t called experimental theater. I didn’t have a context to see it as other. It was theater. It was what my parents did. I went to staged plays, sofa plays where people walk in and they say something and pretend the audience isn’t there, and I thought that was the craziest shit ever. Like, why are you pretending we’re not here? This seems like total bullshit to me. This is weird! So, I had the exact opposite experience than a lot of people.

Eventually I went to acting school where I was told to talk and listen and be real and connect with my scene partner. And that was all very helpful—though I was doing that already instinctually—but I found the experimental work in the city (dance, theater, whatever), much more interesting to be part of. I found myself... bored isn’t fair, but not challenged in a way that I found compelling. I wanted to break that mold, too. I found it… moldy. [laughs] You know, just kind of sitting out too long on the counter. And everyone recognized it was good work, but it was just the same; it didn’t grab my attention.

Dance gave me the permission to be physical. I was very physical growing up, so that was a really good discovery for me. I grew a lot as a performer through dance. As a choreographer and/or director, making dances gives one a lot more to work with on your palate in terms of structure. There is a real kind of narrative, the piece unfolding, but you are not beholden to chronological time or cause and effect in dance and you know, that’s huge. Ugh, what a relief! I can go to where my imagination goes, or I can go to, frankly, how I experience the world—and it’s not the sitcom format.


The Object Lesson will be at BAM Fisher from Nov 5—8. 

Morgan Green is a Brooklyn based theater director and co-founder of New Saloon.
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In Context: The Object Lesson

October 29, 2014, 2:00 pm
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The Object Lesson runs at BAM from October 5—8. Context is everything, so get even closer to the show with this curated selection of 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.


Read
Interview
The Object Lesson—an interview with director David Neumann (BAM blog)
Where making art is concerned, David Neumann believes that "the free flow of ideas should always be encouraged..."

Article
The Object Lesson takes top prize at Edinburgh Festival Fringe(The New York Times)
Scottish accolades did Geoff Sobelle's witty show win.

Interview
A Conversation Between Geoff Sobelle and Lars Jan (BOMB Magazine)
Sobelle chats with the creator of the Next Wave Festival show ABACUS. 

Article
Seriously Absurd: Vaudeville Acts with Egghead Appeal (Stanford.edu)
From his productions with Philly’s Pig Iron Theatre Company to the occasional Shakespaere, Sobelle is busy.

Article
David Neumann: A Man For All Disciplines (BerkshireEagle.com)
Theater and dance come together in the Object Lesson director's solo work.


Watch & Listen 

Video
Next Wave Festival Online Exclusive: Material Universe (BAM)
Katja Loher created this playful meditation on time, permanence, and possession with Geoff Sobelle in response to the latter's The Object Lesson. 

Video
George Carlin’s “Stuff” Routine (YouTube)
Carlin’s famous bit was an influence on Geoff Sobelle’s The Object Lesson.

Video
Edward Gorey’s The Object Lesson (YouTube)
Gorey’s short story—here animated—was the first thing Geoff Sobelle memorized as a kid.

Video
Geoff Sobelle as “Dennis Diamond” (YouTube)
Sobelle's alter ego is a magic-maker.

Video
“Little World” (YouTube)
More stuff in this short film by Sobelle.

Video
“All Wear Bowlers” (YouTube)
Two become three in this work featuring Sobelle.


Now your turn...

So how did you enjoy the show? Likes? Dislikes? Surprises? Tell us what's on your mind in the comments below.

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Last-minute BAM-inspired Halloween Costume Ideas

October 30, 2014, 1:55 pm
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by Chris Tyler



We’re throwing a FREE Halloween party this Friday and costumes are highly encouraged (there will be prizes!). Still haven’t planned yours? Take your inspiration from recent BAM programming with some of these easy-to-assemble costumes:

Robert Wilson's Cupid

Cupid in Shakespeare's Sonnets. Photo: Lesley Leslie-Spinks
For Cupid from Shakespeare's Sonnets, pair a simple white crop top with your favorite white skirt or capris. To that, add angel wings, a trusty bow, and your favorite white pumps. For an authentic Berliner Ensemble look, consider gluing down your eyebrows and applying a clown white base foundation to erase your features. Apply severe new brows with liquid black eyeliner, healthy cheeks of rosy blush, a bit of dark lipstick, and voila! (For an extra dramatic effect, don’t forget the oversized false lashes and charcoal or midnight blue eye shadow.)


Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch dancer

Tanztheater Wuppertal Dancers in Kontakthof.
Celebrate Pina Bausch’s classic battle of the sexes with your own formal wear fantasy! Break out that old prom dress and pair with your most killer heels and an updo. Don’t own a silk dress? Try your favorite thrift store—there’s almost always a black tie section in the back where you can find amazing secondhand gowns for under $15. For an extra eerie look, pair with a freaky mask reminiscent of Kontakthof's masque sequence.


ABACUS Panda
A new friend outside the BAM Fisher. Photo: Rhea Daniels
For a simple ABACUS look, PartyCity is selling this super cute Panda snood. Add an office-friendly pair of Panda glasses and a black-and-white business casual ensemble, and you’re set!


Green Porno Bee

Isabella Rossellini in Green Porno.
Achieve Isabella’s bug-eyed look from Green Porno with oversized sunglasses, like these chic blue Demitria shades. Add an antenna, matching fairy wings, black leggings, and a black-and-yellow striped top for maximum impact. Can’t find a suitable shirt? Consider buying a plain yellow tee from a craft store and adding your own stripes with a chunky black fabric marker or carefully-spaced bands of electrical tape.


Ira Glass
Ira Glass and company in This American Life: One Night Only at BAM. Photo: Michael Nagle.
To achieve that classic This American Life aesthetic (so popular among Brooklyn dogs), pair a sensible pair of thick-framed glasses with your favorite suit. We love Warby Parker’s “Owen” in Revolver Black Matte to mimic Ira Glass's trademark specs, but really any heavy black frames will do. Spike up your hair and grey the sides with a bit of silver temporary hair spray, add a red corsage or pocket square, and consider carrying around a radio to really get the message across. (Crafting an NPR press badge would probably also do the trick).


Forsythe Company dancer in Sider

Dancers in Sider.
Pair your favorite patterned casual wear with a complimentary balaclava fashioned from an old tee to resemble Forsythe's dancers in Sider. Put the t-shirt on upside-down (the neck opening will be in the same place, but the rest of the shirt will be around your face), and loosely tie the excess fabric in a knot on the back of your head. Mark an opening for your face using a fabric marker, remove the shirt, and cut-out the demarcated section with scissors. Tie the mask around your head in the same fashion, and grab a collapsed moving box at Home Depot to complete the look.


Dynasty Handbag

Dynasty Handbag in Soggy Glasses. Photo: Rebecca Smeyne
This nude bodysuit is the perfect first step in dressing as the incomparable Dynasty Handbag this Halloween. Affix a matching nude handbag (what else?) from your favorite thrift store around your waist with a belt or packing tape, and carefully smear a generous amount of navy eye shadow on your lids and around your eyes. Pair with a bright lip. For your own extra-large hero, we recommend Subway.
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Things To Do With 1,000 Pounds of Salt

October 31, 2014, 8:05 am
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Zvi Sahar and PuppetCinema’s show Salt of the Earth uses 1,000 pounds of salt to create a mini dystopian desert for its puppet protagonist to traverse. To better wrap our heads around that improbable number, we came up with this list of other things that could be done in the case of a similar sodium surplus.

With 1,000 pounds of salt, you could:
  • make 26,580 16oz jars of Brooklyn Brine Pickled Rosemary Lemon Beets with Gin
  • de-ice approximately 40% of the Brooklyn Bridge roadway
  • provide 828 people (roughly the audience at a sold-out show at the BAM Harvey Theater) with their annual recommended sodium intake (1500mg a day), delivered via 5lbs-per-person of Martha Stewart's Hot-Smoked Cured Bacon
  • fill 615 boxes of Morton Salt
  • make 20 salt licks for livestock
  • create 3,518 gallons of sea water (roughly 1/300 the amount of water in the old McCarren Park Pool)
  • make 3,402,666 bite-sized salted chocolate caramels, a la Nunu Chocolates in Fort Greene
  • soothe every sore throat in Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, and Park Slope combined (around 159,500 throats) 

See the salt for yourself through Saturday at the BAM Fisher.
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Search

Andy Warhol’s Brooklyn: A Tour

October 31, 2014, 11:19 am
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Andy Warhol is synonymous with the downtown scene of 1960s and '70s New York, but his escapades in Brooklyn are somewhat less chronicled. In anticipation of the upcoming Exposed: Songs for Unseen Warhol Films(Nov 6—8), we reached out to The Andy Warhol Sites Tour guide and author of Andy Warhol’s New York City, Thomas Kiedrowski, for some insight into the Pop Art icon’s Brooklyn haunts, from grand theaters to department store lunch counters, many within walking distance from BAM.

Below is a detailed collection of anecdotes and addresses (plus a map!)—everything you need to set out on a Brooklyn Warhol tour of your own!

by Thomas Kiedrowski

Crowds of teenagers line up for Murray The K's Big Holiday Show at the Brooklyn Fox Theater on December 29, 1964. Photo: Donaldson Collection/Getty Images
The Brooklyn Fox Theater
20 Flatbush Ave

Beginning in the ‘60s, Warhol attended live performances at the Brooklyn Fox, a palatial auditorium built in 1928 (his birth year). 

The rock ‘n’ roll, doo wop, and rhythm ‘n’ blues acts emceed by DJ Murray the K must have left an indelible mark on Warhol. Friends recall his excitement upon seeing Dion live on stage in 1963 alongside Dee Dee Sharp, The Coasters, Lou Christie, and Little Peggy, among others. He went back to see the September show with his close companion Isabel Eberstadt, writer and daughter of poet Ogden Nash, and also met Dionne Warwick that night.

The shows at the Brooklyn Fox, always accompanied by a B movie screening, may have informed Warhol’s 1966 multimedia act The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which incorporated film, strobes, gels, The Velvet Underground, dancers, and more. As with Murray the K’s logo, Warhol also plastered his name in large letters on signs and posters ahead of the main act. Incidentally, the $2.50 cost of the evening show at the Fox was the same price Warhol charged for his EPI shows.


Above: Auditorium of the Brooklyn Fox Theatre.



Below: Abraham & Strauss Department Store at 420 Fulton Street (L), Andy Warhol's "Brillo Box" dress and "Fragile" dress, ca. 1964. (R)



Abraham & Straus
420 Fulton Street

In 1967, Warhol was hired to promote a Mars Co. paper dress sold with a paint kit and demonstrate his skills at coloring the inexpensive outfit, which became the rage in Pop fashion at the time. Warhol and company entered the department store and started a mini-happening causing a frantic scene in the store and directly outside. Nico of the Velvet Underground lay down on a table wearing a clean, white undecorated paper dress and waited for Warhol to get to work. He silkscreened the word “FRAGILE” on the material and signed it “Dali.” He decorated another dress with several of the Velvet Underground’s banana icons. Both dresses were given to the costume collection of the Brooklyn Museum.


62 Montague Street.


Marie Menken and Willard Maas’ Penthouse
62 Montague Street (Brooklyn Heights)

Initially, Warhol was not an apt filmmaker. He attended weekly screenings at the Film-Maker’s Cooperative led by Jonas Mekas, an avid supporter of Andy Warhol and avant-garde cinema in general. Encouraged by Mekas, Warhol purchased a 16mm Bolex camera at Peerless Camera next to Grand Central, and began his own journey into the cinematic arts. 

Timid about shooting and skittish at editing, he was taken under the wing of Marie Menken, a teacher and filmmaker who lived with her poet husband, Willard Maas, in Brooklyn Heights. Their top floor salon was a beacon of intellectual exchange and often argument. Visitors included Edward Albee, Stan Brakhage, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Arthur Miller with his wife Marilyn Monroe, who lived in the same building. Warhol’s beginnings in filmmaking changed greatly with the help and teachings of Menken and Maas. The couple’s surrogate child, Gerard Malanga, became Warhol’s painting assistant, and they became regulars at the Silver Factory. In 1965, Menken filmed Warhol in her garden while he filmed her in a playful interchange, which was spliced into her film portrait of the artist entitled Andy Warhol. 

Menken and Maas’ relationship was a tumultuous one. It was rumored that Albee based his play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on the copious clashes between the two. Warhol created his own look into their relationship with a film entitled Bitch that was never released, but featured cameos by socialite and model Edie Sedgwick and underground film favorite Taylor Mead.


Marie Menken and Willard Maas at home, ca. 1948. Photo: Frank Polach








Related locations:

Truman Capote’s Garden Apartment
70 Willow Street

Norman Mailer's Apartment
142 Columbia Heights


St. Ann's Church, ca 1925.


St. Ann & the Holy Trinity
157 Montague Street

Following Warhol’s death in 1987, Lou Reed and John Cale were commissioned by BAM to create a memorial piece to pay tribute to the artist. The duo hadn’t spoken for years but reunited when they came in contact with each other at Warhol’s Memorial service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on April 1, 1987. The album took nearly two years to complete due to scheduling conflicts between the pair, but the first nearly complete version, titled Songs for Drella, premiered at St. Ann’s in January of 1989, and was then performed at BAM the following December. The title was based on a ‘60s nickname Warhol received at the Factory, a combination of Dracula and Cinderella.


Home of Gerard Basquiat, ca. 1978. Photo: Dinanda Nooney

Basquiat’s family home
553 Pacific Street

Jean Michel Basquiat met Andy Warhol for the first time at a café in SoHo. Basquiat had been selling handmade postcards and was well aware of the Pop artist and his fame. Within a few years, Basquiat established himself as an exceptional artist and was selected to participate in the Whitney Biennial in 1983. Warhol had been somewhat skeptical of the young artist, but was encouraged by his Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger to collaborate with Basquiat on a few paintings. These paintings cemented their working relationship to form a strong bond.

Warhol and Basquiat worked well off of each other, and eventually Basquiat moved into Warhol’s Great Jones street studio rental. In 1985, Basquiat appeared on the cover of the The New York TimesMagazine. Andy and Jean Michel took multiple copies of the magazine to his teenage home on Pacific Street to surprise his father, Gerard.


Warhol at a BAM gala in 1986.
BAM
30 Lafayette Ave

Warhol spent many evenings at BAM beginning in the early ‘60s. He attended a Mr. New York bodybuilding contest in the opera house in May of 1963 with his friends Billy Name (photographer and lighting designer who created the look of Warhol’s Silver Factory) and Ray Johnson (collage and correspondence artist who first promoted Pop Art in his work in the 1950s).

In 1968, Warhol lent his “silver clouds,” for the backdrop in Merce Cunningham’s RainForest.

Warhol also attended the opening of Bill T. Jones’ and Arnie Zane’s Secret Pastures in 1984.  He arrived with a group of friends, including a young Madonna, to support their friend Keith Haring who had provided the set décor for the dance piece.

Following Andy Warhol’s death, BAM commissioned Songs for Drella, performed and filmed in the opera house in December 1989. BAMcinématek also hosted a Warhol film retrospective in 2003.


The Brooklyn Museum in the 1970s.

The Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway

Warhol visited the Brooklyn institution throughout his career, including many galas and social events. In the mid ‘70s, Warhol had promised to accompany Jackie Kennedy and her sister Lee Radziwell to see an exhibition of Egyptian artifacts at the museum. Warhol had just finished shooting The Driver’s Seat, an Italian psychological drama starring Elizabeth Taylor. When he arrived to pick u[ Kennedy and Radziwell, their first words were, “So tell me, Andy, what was Liz Taylor like?” Even though he had painted both of their portraits, the gossipy question was still a shocker to him.

Warhol’s later works were displayed in a retrospective at the museum in 2010 entitled Andy Warhol: The Last Decade.


Brooklyn College
2900 Bedford Ave

Warhol attended a dance recital here in October 1980 to watch and support a young Ronald Reagan.

Lower Manhattan skyline ca. 1970.


Hare Krishnas on the Fulton Street Mall ca. 1970.


Food on Fulton

Warhol often found himself longing for good old-fashioned food like the kind he had when he was young.  He frequently took his young stars and studio assistants to Schrafft’s on Fulton for lunch where they sat next to little old ladies. 

He could also be found chewing on the nutted cream cheese sandwiches from Chock Full o’Nuts located in the Abraham & Straus department store (now Macy’s) on Fulton Street, and also nearby at Bickford’s Cafeteria, which was prevalent in Warhol’s hometown of Pittsburgh.

A few other Warhol restaurant favorites include the River Café in Dumbo (where he dined “on the barge” overlooking the waterfront), Peter Luger (for birthday steam dinners), and what he referred to his diarist, Pat Hackett, as an “Armenian-Turkish-African-Arabian-type restaurant” on Atlantic Ave.



Thomas Kiedrowski is an independent scholar who received his B.F A. in Film from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He lives in New York and leads tours to Warhol sites in New York City.
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In Context: Exposed: Songs for Unseen Warhol Films

October 30, 2014, 2:00 pm
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Exposed: Songs for Unseen Warhol Films runs at BAM from November 6—8. Context is everything, so get even closer to the show with this curated selection of 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.

Program Notes


Read
Article
Andy Warhol's Brooklyn (BAM Blog)
Find out where Warhol hung out in Kings County.

Article
BAM Illustrated: The Making of Dean Wareham (BAM Blog)
Illustrator Nathan Gelgud looks at Wareham's early influences and formative musical moments.

Article
About Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests(Warhol.org)
Read more about these intriguing bite-sized portraits from Warhol’s film output.

Reading
Excerpt from Andy Warhol (The New York Times)
An excerpt from philosopher and Warhol scholar Arthur Danto’s book.

Article
Digitizing Warhol’s Film Trove to Save It (The New York Times)
MoMA and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburg have begun scanning all 1,000 rolls from Warhol’s film oeuvre.

Article
Dean Wareham and Eleanor Friedberger Talk Live (Billboard.com)
Wareham and Friedberger discuss their approaches to scoring never-before-seen Warhol shorts.

Article
Temperature Rising: An Oral History of Galaxie 500 (Pitchfork)
Musicians, writers, and industry bigwigs weigh in on the indispensable band.

Interview
Interview with Eleanor Friedberger (TheRumpus)
Friedberger talks about her sophomore album, what she’s been reading lately, and more.

Article
Did Warhol Change Everything? (The New Yorker)
“The essence of Warhol’s genius,” writes Louis Menand, “was to eliminate the one aspect of a thing without which that thing would, to conventional ways of thinking, cease to be itself, and then to see what happened.”


Watch
Video
Soft Focus: Interview with Suicide (YouTube)
An in-depth interview with the band.

Video
"Bomb," Tom Verlain (YouTube)
Love and Money back Tom Verlaine in this clip from 1987.


Now your turn...
So how did you enjoy the show? Likes? Dislikes? Surprises? Tell us what's on your mind in the comments below.
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BAM Illustrated: The Making of Dean Wareham

November 3, 2014, 11:55 am
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This week, Dean Wareham and The Andy Warhol Museum's Exposed: Songs for Unseen Warhol Films comes to BAM. Wareham curated the musical lineup, and he and Eleanor Friedberger (The Fiery Furnaces), Martin Rev (Suicide), Bradford Cox (Deerhunter, Atlas Sound), and Tom Verlaine (Television) will perform original music alongside 15 never-before-seen Warhol films. 

Wareham and Warhol are a natural fit. Wareham's former band Galaxie 500 toured with the Velvet Underground, and he released 13 Most Beautiful: Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests with his wife, Britta Phillips, in 2010. But who was Wareham before his Galaxie 500 days? Who was he as a kid? What made Dean Wareham? Illustrator Nathan Gelgud took a look at his memoir Black Postcardsto find out.









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Proceed At Your Own Risk—The Ecstatic Rage of Derek Jarman

November 3, 2014, 1:01 pm
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BAMcinématek just kicked off the most comprehensive New York City retrospective of pioneering British queer filmmaker Derek Jarman in nearly two decades. From his collaborations with a young Tilda Swinton and rock legends like the Smiths to his audaciously experimental takes on classic literature, his was a career marked by fervent political commitment and a deeply personal aesthetic.

In addition to laying the foundation for the New Queer Cinema movement, Jarman was a gifted painter and writer. In conjunction with the retrospective, we’ll be giving away a copy of his book, At Your Own Risk: A Saint's Testament. Send an email to contest@bam.org with the subject line “Jarman,” and read critic Thomas Beard on the important place Jarman’s books hold in the legacy of his art.

The Last of England. Photo: Channel Four Films/Photofest

by Thomas Beard

Why do we turn to writings by filmmakers? In some cases, a director’s memoir can offer us a window into cinema’s process with a behind-the-scenes tale, full of incident, about quarrelsome producers and eccentric starlets, while others take a more theoretical bent, addressing the most fundamental questions about the medium, arguing passionately for what cinema is and what it should do. Consider Dziga Vertov on the Kino-Eye’s expanded perception, Maya Deren on cinematography as the creative use of reality, or Stan Brakhage’s eye-popping metaphors on vision. Derek Jarman’s At Your Own Risk: A Saint's Testament, which I revisited in anticipation of BAMcinématek’s upcoming retrospective, belongs, interestingly, to neither genre, yet it is just as vital, for what it provides is a record of sexual awakening that is concomitant and inextricable with a political one—a rich context for the erotic imagination and fighting spirit that would animate Jarman’s films and cement their place within the annals of queer cinema.

The book’s straightforward division into chapters by decade (1940s, 1950s, 1960s...) belies its complex temporal structure. An auteur’s approach to language can often serve as a striking analogue to cinematic style—the aphoristic reductions of Robert Bresson’s thoughts on moviemaking in his Notes on the Cinematographer, for instance, mirror the sublime austerity of his films. So, too, with Jarman, who describes his autobiography as “a series of introductions to matters and agendas unfinished. Like memory, it has gaps, amnesia, fragments of past, fractured present.” The malleability of time is a recurring theme in his work—the willful anachronisms of Caravaggio, the transportation of Elizabeth I to punked-out '70s England in Jubilee—and At Your Own Risk likewise pulses from reminiscences of childhood in a military family to public sex in Hampstead Heath.

Caravaggio. Photo: Cinevista/Photofest

Yet the book’s idiosyncratic design provides more than mere flashbacks; Jarman punctuates his own story with interviews and appropriated text, bringing together scenes of cruisey Gay Liberation Front meetings with tabloid headlines, and police raids on gay bars with Parliamentary debate. It’s a narrative strategy that evinces the contrapuntal force of montage. The 1975 murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini is outlined in grisly detail: “In the forensic photo, Pasolini, disheveled sacrifice, run over by a boy in a car again and again and again to obliterate his identity.” Then suddenly, it cuts to an account by the gay press of the civil unrest which overtook San Francisco in May 1979 following the announcement of a lenient manslaughter sentence for the man who killed Harvey Milk: “Around 4000 homosexuals attacked the City Hall smashing its windows with iron bars and parking meters torn up from the streets, breaking into offices and destroying official records. Thirty police cars were wrecked or set on fire during the riot.”

It’s as though Pasolini’s death had been avenged that day in California. Indeed, one of Jarman’s great achievements—in At Your Own Risk as in his films—is the way he reclaims a queer past and forces us to reckon with it, to share in both the ecstasy and the rage of those lives which might otherwise have been hidden from history. He began this project with Sebastiane, but Jarman’s final hagiography would be his own. These furiously written memoirs, composed in the final years of his life, while he struggled with HIV amid the indifference and contempt of straight society, are astonishingly hopeful. Jarman’s book speaks to the promise of justice, and of love, though both may have come at terrible cost. He is a saint of the bit pillow and the clenched fist.

Thomas Beard is a founder and director of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn.
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Who's Who of Warhol’s Unseen Films?

November 4, 2014, 2:19 pm
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Warhol may be the 20th century’s greatest schmoozer. He actively befriended and connected with the NYC and international art world elite. Many of his mainstay muses are now household names, but Andy’s social net was so wide cast, you may need a brief refresher on the “It” men and women who appear in the films of Exposed: Songs for Unseen Warhol Films.

Mario Montez and Boy, 1965. Photo: Andy Warhol ©2014 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.





John Washing (1963)
      16mm film*, black and white, silent, 4.5 minutes at 16fps**

JOHN GIORNO: A stockbroker before meeting Andy, John Giorno later wrote poetry influenced by advertising and founded Giorno Poetry Systems in 1965. Artists such as William Burroughs, John Ashbery, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, and Philip Glass collaborated on live “happenings” as well as recordings with synthesizers that Giorno termed “electronic sensory poetry environments.”


Jill (1963)
      16mm film, black and white, silent, 4.5 minutes at 16fps

JILL JOHNSTON: Jill Johnston was a dance critic at The Village Voice and deeply immersed in the avant-garde scene of performers formulating in the 1960s when she met Andy. Writing under the name F.J. Crowe, Johnston wrote Lesbian Nation and other feminist and cultural critiques until her death in 2010.


Bob Indiana Etc. (1963)
      16mm film, color, silent, 4 minutes at 16fps

WYNN CHAMBERLAIN: With two works in the permanent exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, there’s a reason The New York Times called Chamberlain a “pioneer realist painter.” He was an integral part of Andy’s circle and utilized several Factory members in the film he wrote, produced, and directed, Brand X, including Taylor Mead, Baby Jane Holzer, and Candy Darling.

Wynn Chamberlain & Andy Warhol.
JOHN GIORNO: See above.

ROBERT INDIANA: The man behind the iconic and most widely-recognized image from Pop Art, Indiana’s LOVE still appears in museums, on postage stamps, and as sculptures. Robert Indiana’s oeuvre is far more expansive, though, as evidenced in his recent retrospective at the Whitney Museum.

Robert Indiana & Andy Warhol.
MARISOL: A Venezuelan sculptor who was passionately interested in pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. She managed to capitalize on the pop scene with exhibitions and creative successes throughout the 60s. El Museo del Barrio is currently displaying a major retrospective of her work.

Marisol & Andy Warhol.
ELEANOR WARD: An art dealer and founder of the infamous Stable Gallery who was known for working with some of the most boundary-pushing artists of the 50s and 60s. Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, and Robert Indiana each had his first one-man show at her gallery. Another protégé, Marisol, noted, ''Eleanor knew how to create a sense of theater.”


Allen (excerpt) (1964)
    16mm film, black and white, silent, 3.2 minutes at 16fps

GREGORY CORSO: An essential member of the Beat movement who Ginsberg called an “awakener of youth,” Gregory Corso produced work in Boston, San Francisco, and Paris with fellow Beat poets.

ALLEN GINSBERG: Ginsberg’s appearance at “The ‘6’ Gallery Reading” in San Francisco in 1955 was the driving force behind the Beat Generation. It’s here that he first read his poem, “Howl,” publicly. Many consider Ginsberg to be the leader and founder of the Beat poets.

JACK KEROUAC: An American writer best known for his novel On the Road and his close bond with Ginsberg, Burroughs, and other great Beat writers.

GERARD MALANGA: The New York Times referred to Malanga as “Warhol’s most important associate,” particularly during Andy’s most fruitful period from 1963-1970. He helped with everything from silkscreen painting to filmmaking, acted in several Warhol films, choreographed the music of the Velvet Underground for The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and was one of the founding editors of Interview.

TAYLOR MEAD: Warhol saw Mead performing poetry in the late 50s, and they later met to take a cross-country road trip to LA in 1963 where they filmed part of his first Warhol film Tarzan and Jane Regained…Sort Of. Deemed one of the first Warhol superstars of the Factory, Mead appeared most recently in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes and was still performing weekly at the Bowery Poetry Club throughout the early 2000s. He was an LES resident and a staple of the bohemian scene (The New York Times called him “the quintessential Downtown figure”) appearing in hundreds of films (by his count at least) and writing poetry up until his death in 2013.

Andy Warhol & Taylor Mead.


PETER ORLOVSKY: A poet and actor who was Ginsberg’s partner until Ginberg’s passing in 1997. He later joined the faculty of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute in Colorado.


Jack Cigarette (excerpt from Batman Dracula) (1964)
    16mm film, black and white, silent, 4.4 minutes at 16fps
 
BEVERLY GRANT: An underground actress who appeared in a few Warhol films. She was married to experimental video artist and musician, Tony Conrad. Of note: Tony was credited with inadvertently helping Lou Reed and John Cale name The Velvet Underground.

JACK SMITH: A pioneer underground filmmaker, performance artist, and photographer who had a deep and lasting influence on Andy Warhol and queer, experimental cinema. He was particularly interested in the movies of Maria Montez for their extravagant costumes, sets, and performance.


Screen Test: Donovan [ST 78] (1966)
    16mm film, black and white, silent, 4.2 minutes at 16fps

DONOVAN: One of the few who brought 1960s subculture to the mainstream, Donovan won over popular audiences with songs such as “Colors” and “Mellow Yellow.” He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.


Marisol – Stop Motion (1963)
    16mm film, black and white, silent, 4.5 minutes at 16fps

MARISOL: See above.


Screen Test: Edie Sedgwick [ST 310] (1965)
    16mm film, color, silent, 4.5 minutes at 16fps

EDIE SEDGWICK: Edie can definitely be classified as Andy’s girl Friday as she was his go-to for his art, films, social appearances, and so much more. The original “It Girl,” she was also named the “Youthquaker” by Vogue.

Andy Warhol & Edie Sedgwick.

Paraphernalia (1966)
    16mm film, color, silent, 3.8 minutes at 16fps

INTERNATIONAL VELVET (Susan Bottomly): She began modeling at the age of sixteen and shortly thereafter met Gerard Malanga, who introduced her to Warhol. After appearing in a Warhol Screen Test, she was renamed International Velvet and went onto appear in many Warhol films. Warhol considered her “very beautiful” and was fascinated with her facial features and precise makeup application.

International Velvet & Andy Warhol for Esquire .



Nico/Antoine (1966)
    16mm film, color, silent, 4.4 minutes at 16fps

Antoine (Pierre Antoine Muracciolo): Not much is known about this French singer, although he does appear in videos walking around NYC with Nico and seems to have been part of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

NICO: Another Warhol superstar who rose to true stardom supplying vocals to The Velvet Underground’s debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico. She also had a successful solo career as a singer, composer, lyricist, and model.

Andy Warhol & Nico.

Kiss the Boot (excerpt) (1966)
    16mm film, black and white, silent, 4.5 minutes at 16fps

GERARD MALANGA: See above.

MARY WORONOV: One of Warhol’s “superstars,” Mary danced with Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Warhol’s multimedia presentation with the Velvet Underground. She appeared in many Warhol Films, including Chelsea Girls in 1966, one of Warhol’s first commercial successes.


Screen Test: Marcel Duchamp and Benedetta Barzini [ST 81] (1966)
    16mm film, black and white, silent, 4.2 minutes at 16fps
 
MARCEL DUCHAMP: Andy and Marcel met in 1963 at an opening at the MoMA. Duchamp noted, “I liked Warhol's spirit. He's not just some painter or movie-maker. He's a filmeur and I like that very much.” That meant a lot coming from one of Andy’s greatest artistic and conceptual influences. Duchamp was a trailblazer of the Dada movement and the inventor of “Readymades,” everyday objects like a fountain or a bicycle wheel presented as art.

Duchamp being filmed by Warhol.
BENEDETTA BARZINI: An Italian model and actress, Barzini was named one of the “100 Great Beauties of the World” in 1966 by Harper’s Bazaar. She was a staple of Warhol’s Factory and even became engaged to one of Andy’s early collaborators, media artist Gerard Malanga, but later decided to move back to her homeland to pursue a full-fledged acting career.


Mario Montez and Boy (1965)
    16mm film, color, silent, 4 minutes at 16fps

MARIO MONTEZ: A Warhol “superstar” from Puerto Rico, Montez was featured in 13 of Andy’s underground films from 1964-66. He took his drag name from actress Maria Montez, a gay icon in the 50s and 60s. He appeared in Jack Smith’s 1963 classic film Flaming Creatures.

RICHARD SCHMIDT: Very little to no information exists about this “boy,” except that he did appear in screen tests and a Warhol film called More Milk, Yvette with Mario Montez and Paul Caruso.


Me and Taylor (1963)
      16mm film, black and white, silent, 4.5 minutes at 16fps

TAYLOR MEAD: See above.

ANDY WARHOL: The man behind it all and one of the most culturally significant figures of our time.
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