Triptych (Eyes of One on Another), Photo: Maria Baranova
By Susan Yung
Triptych (Eyes of One on Another), coming to the Howard Gilman Opera House June 6—8, is a paean to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work was key in the culture wars of the 1980—90s. The Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, and its Director Dennis Barrie, were acquitted of obscenity charges stemming from an exhibition of Mapplethorpe photographs. Bryce Dessner, who composed the score for Triptych, grew up in Cincinnati and recalls, “I was told by the authorities that I was not allowed to look at Mapplethorpe’s photographs—that these tremendous works of art were not art at all, but pornography … Barrie was jailed and art was put on trial in municipal court. It was a huge moment for me.” This case was one example of a late-20th-century conservative trend to censor artwork that might be offensive, particularly those made at least in part with public funding, and which paralleled the denial of AIDS by the Reagan Administration and the suppression of information about the ravaging disease. Some BAM artists became targets of censorship as well.
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Still/Here, 1994 Photo: Dan Rest
Bill T. Jones Still/Here, Bill T. Jones’ 1994 multimedia meditation on people lost to AIDS, was described by Arlene Croce in The New Yorker as “victim art,” and was thus un-reviewable. It sparked fierce debate. “By working dying people into his act, Jones is putting himself beyond the reach of criticism,” Croce wrote. “I think of him as literally undiscussable—the most extreme case among the distressingly many now representing themselves to the public not as artists but as victims and martyrs.”
Andres Serrano, Hooded Warbler II, Cibachrome print, 23.5”x19.5”, 2000. Edition of 40 signed and numbered. BAM Photography Portfolio I, published by Serge Sorokko Gallery.
Andres Serrano Serrano’s Piss Christ drew criticism by US senators, who were outraged that the work, which they deemed blasphemous, had received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA’s budget was subsequently cut. Serrano contributed Hooded Warbler II to BAM’s 2000 photography portfolio.
Tim Miller, Democracy in America, 1984. Photo: Tom Caravaglia
Tim Miller Miller was one of the “NEA 4”—four artists (also Karen Finley, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes) whose NEA grants were vetoed by the head of the NEA in 1990. Their work received scrutiny and criticism as being blasphemous and a waste of taxpayer money. After their cases went to court and their grants were restored, the NEA stopped funding individual artists.
Robert Mapplethorpe In 1989, Mapplethorpe’s exhibition The Perfect Moment was canceled by the Corcoran Museum (DC). When it traveled to Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, the director Dennis Barrie was charged with obscenity, unsuccessfully. Besides being the subject matter of Triptych (Eyes of One on Another), Mapplethorpe photographed a number of BAM artists (including Philip Glass, above) over the years.
Situated somewhere between erotic heat and cool classicism, the work of controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe obliterates the high-low divide, exploding classical conceptions of beauty. Fueled by a lifelong fascination with the artist’s transgressive, sacred-profane vision, composer Bryce Dessner (The National), in collaboration with Korde Arrington Tuttle, designer Carlos Soto, video designer Simon Harding, and director Kaneza Schaal (JACK &, 2018 Next Wave), invites us to experience these arresting images anew. Featuring photographic projections and a new score by Dessner—performed by the daring eight-person vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth and a chamber orchestra—Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) examines how we look and are looked at, bringing us face to face with our innermost desires, fears, and humanity.
After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought by posting in the comments below and on social media using #Triptych.
Article Roomful of Teeth is Revolutionizing Choral Music (The New Yorker) "It’s really just pushing the bounds of what’s beautiful," says Roomful of Teeth's founder Brad Wells in this profile of the experimental vocal group.
Blog BAM Artists and the Culture Wars of the 80s and 90s (BAM Blog) Mapplethorpe’s photos were a target of the late-20th-century conservative trend to censor artwork that might be offensive; several BAM artists were not spared.
Blog Bryce Dessner on Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) (BAM Blog) We spoke with Bryce Dessner about his connection to Mapplethorpe’s photography, how he structured his composition, and how Tuttle’s libretto influenced the music.
Video Finding Poetry and Music in Mapplethorpe (YouTube) Director Kaneza Schaal and composer Bryce Dessner discuss their work on Triptych (Eyes of One on Another).
Now your turn...
What did you think? Tell us what's on your mind in the comments below and on social media using #Triptych.
Danny Kapilian has brought some of the biggest and most exciting names in music to the BAM R&B Festival at MetroTech, our free Thursday-afternoon summer concert series, since 1995. Burning Spear, Percy Sledge, Sharon Jones, Ashford & Simpson … the list of all-stars who have transformed MetroTech Commons into a musical hotspot over the years is endless. We asked Danny about his original vision for the festival, some of the most memorable performances, and what he’s looking forward to this year. How did this all start? In 1994, Joe Melillo asked if I’d be interested in producing a festival at MetroTech, which was only recently built in Downtown Brooklyn. There was a fledgling BAM series of live events there that were not as successful as hoped. I lived very close by, and understood who the audience would be at MetroTech. I recommended moving the shows from Friday 5pm to Thursday 12pm, so we’d have a captive lunchtime crowd on a day that’s not a weekend. Additionally, I felt it was important to entertain with popular artists. Our first-ever show in June 1995 starred Percy Sledge (“When A Man Loves A Woman”).
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What makes the festival unique? First, we are the only R&B festival in the entire Northeast. To me, R&B is an all-encompassing title that covers the broad spectrum of Black American music and its influences in all forms and styles: jazz, soul, blues, gospel, hip-hop, reggae, New Orleans, doo-wop, fusions of all sorts, rock, West African and South African, Latin, and much, much more. Secondly, this is arguably the most popular music there is in the United States, and it is a vast world of music that does not get presented and celebrated enough in a festival context. (There is JazzFest and the Essence Festival in New Orleans, but we need this here in NYC!) Finally, our physical set-up at MetroTech is intimate (a low stage close to the audience), and it’s beautiful with all of the trees keeping everyone a bit cooler on hot summer afternoons.
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How has MetroTech impacted the Brooklyn community? The BAM R&B Festival is the best gift to the communities of Brooklyn and surrounding areas. Many of the great artists we present only play ticketed theaters in NYC, and some don’t come here at all. The feeling shared among MetroTech workers on their lunch breaks, and community folks all together, is just an immense joy.
How have you been able to sustain and push the original concept forward for 25 years? First of all, the music and artists we present are among my favorites. So it’s easy to remain dedicated and passionate about it. On the business side, apart from this festival, I’ve been a concert and special live music event producer since the mid-1980s, bringing programs not only to BAM, but many renowned theaters and festivals across the US and worldwide. So I parlay my experience knowledge and most important my professional relationships to best benefit the festival.
Many legendary artists have performed at the BAM R&B Festival at MetroTech. Which performances stand out and why? First and foremost, I must mention with deepest honor and remembrance the many great performing artists who we have presented through the first 24 years at the festival who have since passed, including Percy Sledge, Johnny Maestro, Jerry Gonzales, Harold Melvin, Buckwheat Zydeco, Bobby Blue Bland, Rufus Thomas, Ruth Brown, Soloman Burke, Cuba Gooding Sr., Wendell and Popsy Holmes, Clarence Gatemouth Brown, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Henry Butler, Pops Staples, Bo Diddley, Ben E. King, Leon Russell, Johnnie Johnson, Fontella Bass, Little Milton, Wilson Pickett, Roger Troutman, Chuck Brown, Roy Hargrove, Sharon Jones, Odetta, Billy Paul, Nick Ashford, Andy Palacio, James Cotton, Otis Clay, Phoebe Snow, Richie Havens, Allen Toussaint, Bernie Worrell, Gary Shider, Geri Allen, and Charles Bradley.
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As for the memorable concerts, there are too many to go through, but here are some that come to mind: Wilson Pickett, who had just had heart surgery and specified in his contract a 70-minute maximum show—and then I couldn’t get him off the stage after more than two hours. Burning Spear was nearly retired from touring when we presented him, and the reggae crowd showed up in droves - the single biggest audience we ever had. George Clinton and P-Funk’sfirst appearance with us turned MetroTech into the craziest funk party imaginable. Snarky Puppy brought out the coolest, hippest “Williamsburg-ian” crowd we’ve ever had. Leon Russell seemed to be severely slowed down by age as he made his way to the stage, but the moment he sat down at the piano he lost 40 years and the spirit of Jerry Lee Lewis took over. Phoebe Snow and Richie Havens’ performances were among the most riveting moving sets we’ve ever had, moving everyone to tears—and were both outwardly grateful for being presented at an R&B festival rather than a rock theater. For the second appearance by Booker T and the MGs, I brought in Sharon Jones as a guest lead singer, and they tore the place apart. The Stylistics, featuring all their original lead singers, not only drew one of the biggest crowds we ever had, but was by far the most amazing singalong in our 24 years so far… everyone knew every word. Rufus and Carla Thomas had not performed together anywhere at all in more than a decade, but I cajoled them on the phone, met that at La Guardia, took them to a Southern soul food lunch in Fort Greene, and their set was deeply emotional and incredibly funky. Solomon Burke lived up to the legend that he was, bringing his gigantic king’s throne on stage with him. Trumpet/composer great Roy Hargrove performed with his pioneering jazz fusion ensemble RH Factor. Dr. John came to us long before his run at the BAM Opera House, and the New Orleans JazzFest fans packed MetroTech. Angelique Kidjo brought her African-influenced pop and soul to us when she was just starting to be known. Little Anthony and the Imperials were second only to The Stylistics in the MetroTech audience singalong contest. Jimmy Cliff performed one of the most brilliant and emotional sets we’ve ever had. Maxi Priest—I’ll admit it—was more thrilling and drew a bigger more passionate crowd than I’d anticipated. Ruth Brown brought her 1950s R&B hits with songs from her Broadway smash “Black and Blue”. Fishbone’s appearance was as eccentric and fabulous as you’d expect. Both Henry Butler and Sheila E performed incredible sets in a steady rain to a sea of grooving umbrellas. The Ohio Players’ first appearance was one of their last with their original lead singer “Sugarfoot”. The ageless legend Bobby Rush performed his utterly salacious and hilarious shows for us twice. King Sunny Ade brought his Nigerian band of virtuosos and knocked out the place with his pioneering West African grooves. The Hallelujah Train was led by incredible drummer/composer Brian Blade featuring his legendary Louisiana preacher father with guests including producer Daniel Lanois on guitar. Tank and the Bangas were hot off their NPR Tiny Desk Contest win when they brought new hip-hop/R&B fusion sounds from New Orleans. Savion Glover sustained a virtuoso 90-minute set of tap accompanied by drummer Marcus Gilmore. Finally, Ashford and Simpson’s incredible deep set of thrilling hits inspired my then-two-year-old son Lieff to become a drummer—now he’s 14 and, having virtually grown up backstage at MetroTech, is a committed and talented jazz and R&B drummer soon to attend a major performing arts high school in New Orleans.
June 13: Ghost-Note is a new funk/jazz fusions ensemble; an offshoot of the virtuosic cross-genre Brooklyn-based three-time Grammy winning Snarky Puppy.
June 20: Roy Ayers was already a legend in soul and R&B and jazz before he became one of the most sampled artists in hip-hop - opening an entirely new fan base.
June 27: Phony Ppl are the most fun and exciting new band I’ve seen in ages - selling out an extended run of engagements at the Blue Note with lines down the block. Conya Doss is also the kind of R&B artist with a passionate following we need to embrace.
July 18: Fantastic Negrito came to my attention a few years ago due to his original and dramatic updating of blues styles, and also because of his compelling personal story. The Brooklyn United Drumline is all Brooklyn middle and high school kids who present thrilling marching band traditions—of course they’ll be at MetroTech!
July 25: Cha Wa is the newest and among the best of the New Orleans brass bands, who uniquely also showcase the Mardi Gras Indian legacy in their live shows.
August 1: Ruthie Foster is simply one of the finest vocalists in the world, period. Her passionate original mix of folk, blues, gospel, and soul sets her apart.
August 15: Once in a rare while there is an artist who is too good for the marketplace, but whose fans know the score. Van Hunt is that guy—an utterly brilliant cat whose musical world lives somewhere between Prince and D’Angelo. &More, featuring Questlove’s sister Donn T, opens with their own utlra-cool Philly thing.
In January 2019, David Binder assumed the role of BAM’s Artistic Director, succeeding Executive Producer Joseph V. Melillo. BAM President Katy Clark recently spoke to David on the brink of the announcement of his first Next Wave.
Katy Clark: You once told me that while you didn’t know it at the time, your career, as varied and winding as it has been, has been preparing you to come to BAM the whole time. What did you mean by that?
David Binder: When you’re moving through life, it’s impossible to see how the dots will connect, but looking back, you can see how perfectly they align. That’s the case for BAM and me.
See, I grew up in Los Angeles, where I was mostly exposed to musicals—you know, the barricade-busting, chandelier-dropping kind. Once in a while, a great play would come to town; I remember seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company’s epic Nicholas Nickleby in 1986, or the Broadway company version of Fences, but mostly it was about big touring shows. When I went to UC Berkeley, I spent a lot of time at Cal Performances. Everybody performed there. We had Bill T. Jones with Arnie! I feel so lucky to have seen that. I also remember seeing Mark Morris in a long wig, dancing with a remote-controlled Tonka truck! After college I moved to New York to work on Broadway, not knowing exactly what I wanted to do. I had so many jobs. I was in the costume shop running errands for the legendary designer William Ivey Long on Assassins—even though I couldn’t sew. I worked as a PA on a play called The Sum of Us at the Cherry Lane; it starred Tony Goldwyn, who is now starring in Ivo van Hove’s Network, which I’m producing. I was a PA on The Secret Garden. That’s where I met John Cameron Mitchell, who I ended up spending the next 20 years with, working on a show that became Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Katy: How did you wind up at BAM?
David: My dear friend Karen Fricker, who is now the theater critic for the Toronto Star, was taking her university students to BAM performances, and she always had an extra ticket. I saw everything. The Death of Klinghoffer, The Hard Nut, Still/Here, The Black Rider. It’s at BAM where I met and fell in love with Pina Bausch, the Maly Theatre, and Cheek By Jowl. I learned so much here. It’s where I grew up. It’s where I figured out who I am and what I wanted to make.
Death of Klinghoffer (1991), Black Rider (1993), and Still/Here (1994) were some of the first performances David Binder attended at BAM
Katy: So how did you start producing?
David: I had been in New York just a little over a year, and I was itching to do something of my own. I came up with the idea to do a reading series of Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory, which is this beautiful story about how Capote spends Christmas with his cousin. It would be Love Letters-style, with two different stars reading the short story each night, and all proceeds would benefit Equity Fights AIDS. We needed talent, so we dropped letters off to actors at their apartments, at stage doors— basically anywhere we could find them. Lo and behold, people said yes: Madeline Kahn, Irene Worth, Elaine Stritch, Judith Ivey, and Nathan Lane all agreed to come to the Book Friends Café in Chelsea and take part in our little series. They were so patient—my friends and I had never produced anything in our lives. The New York Times wrote a short preview piece and we were sold out.
Katy: Persistence paid off! How important is that quality for a producer?
David: It’s important, but what continues to drive me is the work—great work. There were a million other benefits those big stars could have participated in, but they chose that one. Why? Because that Truman Capote Christmas story is the best. I’m a Jewish boy from LA—what’s Christmas?—and even I don’t see how anyone could read it and not tear up.
Or take A Raisin in the Sun. When I came to realize, in 1999, that it never had a Broadway revival, I spent the next four and a half years trying to produce one. No one wanted to be in it, no one wanted to fund it, no one wanted to give me a theater. Everyone on Broadway said it was an African-American play, and that African- American audiences wouldn’t come to Broadway. Actors told me the play was dated. But I had it on my desk, this gorgeous American play— maybe the best American play ever written. And it got me through. The material got me through. Lorraine Hansberry got me through!
Katy: Ok, so here we are, it’s the 38th Next Wave. And yet it feels utterly new.
David: We’re honoring the original intent of the Next Wave, passed down from Harvey Lichtenstein and Joe Melillo, by presenting a season of artists who’ve never been to BAM. All of them, every single one of them, is making their BAM debut. These are performances that will be experiential, immersive, and—I hope—surprising. Some of them will be wildly challenging to audiences, and some will be very accessible. You have something like Barber Shop Chronicles, for example, which is for everyone. It’s brimming with life and joy and music and dancing. On the other side of the spectrum you have Bacchae, by the amazing Marlene Monteiro Freitas. While it’s certainly challenging, it’s also exhilarating, wild, singular, and extraordinary. We’ll have site-specific work—something BAM has not done in a while. With User Not Found, which explores how we all experience private moments in public spaces, we’re getting out of our buildings and going up the street to the Greene Grape Annex, a cafe on Fulton Street. I love bringing audiences to nontraditional spaces; it immediately awakens their senses and, I think, makes them more open to adventurous work.
We also want to put audiences front and center. In Many Hands does that—there’s no stage. The audience is the performance. I’m also interested in work that appeals to younger audiences. The End of Eddy, adapted from the book by Édouard Louis, is a brilliant coming-of-age story that will resonate with teenagers. It’s something we’re working on with Coco Killingsworth, BAM’s VP of Education and Community Engagement. It also gives us an opportunity to deepen our relationships with other arts organizations: St. Ann’s Warehouse will simultaneously be presenting a theatrical adaptation of Louis’ second book, History of Violence, as part of their fall season.
There are new forms. What if they went to Moscow? is kind of like two shows in one: One half of the audience starts at the BAM Fisher, where the performers will be a making a film, which will be streamed live for the rest of the audience at BAM Rose Cinemas. At intermission, they switch places. I’m so excited to be working with Gina Duncan, our Associate VP of Film, and the rest of the film team on this. Lastly, The Second Woman is a single 24-hour show. We’re encouraging people to come for 15 minutes or 24 hours, if they so wish. In this epic feat of acting endurance, one woman performs a scene from a Cassavetes film 100 times, opposite 100 men. It’s bold, adventurous, and, as with everything in Next Wave 2019, I hope the experience will stay with you long after the performance ends. I’m so excited and proud to be a part of it.
Canada’s beloved contemporary ballet company celebrates 10 years of excellence under the leadership of artistic director Emily Molnar, a former soloist with Ballett Frankfurt. In a kind of career-spanning reunion, this evening-length trio sets a new piece (To This Day) by Molnar alongside Enemy in the Figure, a masterwork by her former mentor William Forsythe, as well as Solo Echo, choreographed by fellow Frankfurt alum Crystal Pite. Emotive, expansive, and supremely theatrical, these three daring works embody the innovative spirit and tenacious artistry for which Ballet British Columbia has become known.
After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought by posting in the comments below and on social media using #BalletBC.
Article William Forsythe: ‘Isn’t Ballet Delightful?’ (The New York Times) A profile of the innovative choreographer, from his classical training “into more theatrical and improvisational terrain.”
Blog A Leader in Ballet Celebrates 10 Years (Stance on Dance) Get to know Emily Molnar, the visionary leader behind Ballet BC, whose pioneering philosophies and methods have helped to transform the company.
In the conventional sense, the stage is defined by the space between the three visible walls and the fourth invisible wall. The three visible walls separate the theater from the real world, and the fourth wall separates the audience from the performers. A wall is a divider. It blocks the audience’s view; it reduces performing space. So setting up additional walls on stage is tricky. But when it’s done right, the effect can be quite, shall we say, theatrical. Two upcoming engagements at BAM feature such spectacular uses of walls. When Ballet BC makes its BAM debut Jun 13—15, it will bring William Forsythe’s Enemy in the Figure. This dance incites feelings of mystery, foreboding, and excitement, often at the same time. And Forsythe’s staging is part of the magic. As Roslyn Sulcas of The New York Times described, “Making use of an undulating screen positioned diagonally across the stage, a rope that is pulsed across the floor as if indicating energy levels or secret messages, a floodlight on wheels that is manipulated by the dancers, and a ticking, brooding score by Thom Willems, Enemy in the Figure is a dark and thrilling poem about vision and perception, form and chaos.”
Alistair Spalding, artistic director of the Sadler’s Wells, rated it as one of his top six Forsythe dances. This 1989 dance came to BAM in 2001 with Ballett Frankfurt; its return by a different company is highly anticipated.
Aurélien Bory’s particular stagecraft is to create sets that look overwhelming at first, but through highly choreographed interactions by performers, take on human qualities. In Les sept planches de la ruse (2008 Next Wave), it was a giant three-dimensional tangram; in Sans Objet (2012), a 1970 automotive robot looked like it could crush anything in its way; in Plexus(2016), a box wired with 5700 nylon strings threatened to strangle the dancer Kaori Ito. And now, in Espæce (Jun 20—22), it’s a giant black wall that seems as immovable as the Empire State Building. But somehow the five performers (Guilhem Benoit, Cochise Le Berre, Katell Le Brenn, Olivier Martin Salvan, and singer Claire Lefilliâtre) find a way to co-exist and even have fun with it.
Other BAM artists have created memorable theater works with walls. Who can forget that terrifying image in Pina Bausch’s Palermo Palermo (1991 Next Wave) when a towering concrete block wall crashed down and the dancers had to perform the rest of the show in the rubble!
Sasha Waltz, another dance theater enthusiast, created similarly unsettling images in Gezeiten (2010). The set was a derelict house with crumbling walls and peeling paint. It was rendered unrecognizable after the dancers ripped apart the floorboards and set the back wall on fire. The stage world they inhabited was as unforgiving as the world outside, and yet they soldiered on.
Not all walls need to be destroyed. Brooklyn-based sculptor John Emerson Bell designed a visually appealing wall for David Dorfman’s Come, and Back Again (2013 Next Wave). The 10x40 foot monochromatic wall was constructed from refuse, mementos, and found objects that evoked images of an artful junkyard or a very industrious hoarder’s home.
The “wall as view blocker” function was used to great effect in the Scottish Opera’s production of Greek (2018 Next Wave). An Oedipus story set in 1990 London, the opera has a raucously dissonant score invoking the edgy feeling of the time and the unsettling plot. A giant wall pinned the singers to a narrow lip at the front of the stage; as the wall revolved, portals passed over the strategically-placed performers. Almost every line was addressed (sometimes shouted) directly at the audience. Images worthy of London tabloids were sometimes projected on it. If “in your face” is what the creators were aiming for, they succeeded!
One of the most stunning uses of a wall on BAM stage comes from Ohad Naharin’s Sadeh21 (2014 Next Wave). A low-lying beige wall lined three sides of the stage. For the entire dance it served no more than a soothing backdrop until the last 15 minutes, when, one by one, dancers emerged on top of it and fell backward into the darkness. Meanwhile, credits were projected on it like the end of the movie. The contrast of astounding and mundane, imaginary and real, left the audience not knowing if they should applaud!
An enormous moveable wall splits and folds like a book. Five performers—three dancers, a soprano, and an actor—navigate this stunning monolith to create a shape-shifting tableau. Aurélien Bory’s playful, poetic work of physical theater is inspired by the life and work of writer-trickster Georges Perec, best known for his wordplay and droll wit. Using Perec’s Species of Spaces as a jumping-off point and diving into a physical riddle of arrivals and departures, presence and absence, Espæce destabilizes our expectations to moody and mischievous effect.
After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought by posting in the comments below and on social media using #espaece.
Article EMPTINESS, A USER’S MANUAL (CIE 111) Scroll through for more visuals of Espæce and an interview with Bory on how Perec’s writing inspired his shape-shifting work.
Video SANS OBJET - Pièce d'Aurélien Bory (YouTube) Bory returned to our 2012 Next Wave festival with his captivating ballet and acrobatic dialogue between man and machine, Sans Objet.
Now your turn...
What did you think? Tell us what's on your mind in the comments below and on social media using #espaece.
The film festivalThe New Yorker called “The city’s best independent showcase” is in full swing, which makes Mike Katz, who has been the Head Projectionist here at BAM since the cinemas opened in 1998, along with Jesse Green, our Cinema Technical Manager, currently two of the busiest men in show business. We thought we’d make their day even more complicated by sneaking into their submarine-like lair to ask them a couple questions about the unique challenges posed by such a unique cinema experience. (You’re welcome, guys.) So, what makes a film festival challenging for a projectionist?
Mike: You have to hold a lot of hands. Jesse's very good at doing that. Basically, with festivals, it’s like having a family with lots of different children. You try and give them everything they need, you want to be able to sit down at the table at the same time for dinner or go to bed at the same time—and with a festival like this, everybody is the most important baby. Our job is to get it on screen, with the problems they might have: file work, actual cinematography problems, audio issues, and the like, and help them beforehand to get it to where it's a good show. We may not be responsible for content, but there's a lot of extracurricular work and stress getting things delivered on time, and at the end of the day when you get it all together, it’s just another show that has to be done right.
Jesse: Specifically with BAMcinemaFest, it’s a lot of up-and-coming filmmakers who don’t have the resources of a studio with lots of money, so we do what we can to help them get onscreen in the best way possible, whether it’s with them stopping by to look at a couple of versions of their movie, or by receiving final versions a day before the festival starts. I'm not going to say no when they had to make some changes and send us a new version.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Jesse Green, Cinema Technical Manager
Is the complexity fun and appealing... or is it a pain?
Mike: All of the above. It's stressful, but also rewarding. With the stress, when you pull it all off and everything comes together, and you actually helped somebody and they come back and recognize that, it’s very rewarding.
Jesse: One of my favorite things is seeing filmmakers experience their movie in the cinema for the first time. Whether that's with an audience, or whether it's in the afternoon when I'm just running their movie or something, that pure joy and excitement, after a journey that could have been 2 or 10 years long, is the greatest. It's so nice to see.
Mike: It’s a cool feeling, when they’re standing around in the back, looking around at people's faces, you realize they’ve been working with this on a monitor, after struggling with different people, actors, locations, finances, etc., with the ultimate goal to get it onscreen where people can see it. Whether it's to get it bought, to proliferate their career, whether it's a love song they had to get out. And I was a part of it, even if I was just showing a movie.
Daisy Desnuda (photo by Doug Ross) and Flower Tortilla (photo by Michael Avance)
By David Hsieh
They have double identities. To BAM staff and patrons, they are Leo Paredes and Hector Rios, with the totally normal job titles of, respectively, Operations Coordinator for Education and Community Engagement and Special Events Coordinator. But to New York’s night crawlers, they are known as Daisy Desnuda, burlesque thespian, and Flower Tortilla, drag queen. But once in a while, the two lives converge. Such is the case when Flower Tortilla performs at Everybooty, BAM’s annual Pride party, joining many other New York night life glitterati in celebration of diversity and creativity. We talked to them about what it’s like pursuing two parallel career paths.
Can you tell us about your day jobs?
Hector Rios: I started at BAM in February 2018 as a part of the Special Events team, which is an arm of Development. We handle events geared toward our patrons and members and offer interdepartmental support on large parties.
Leo Paredes: I started at BAM in September 2016. I’m the Operations Coordinator for Education and Community Engagement. I manage all calendars for the Education department, collecting programming information and distributing it to other departments, among other duties.
What is your night life and how did you start it? HR: I perform as drag queen Flower Tortilla. I’ve been doing it for three years.
My introduction to drag was through theater. I took a course at Pace University about drag in theater. We studied how actors and actresses portray masculinity on stage. Then I started to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race. I got the idea that there could be a crossover so I tried it and it has snowballed into this big part of my life.
LP: My stage persona is Daisy Desnuda. I’m a burlesque performer. In college I took a class on turn-of-the-century pop culture, which was about circus, burlesque, sideshows, and I was obsessed with it. I wrote a senior thesis on burlesque as art. Then one day I took a class at New York Burlesque School and fell in love with it, and three months later, I got on stage. I’m also a strong advocate for body and sex positivity and sex workers’ rights. So burlesque fits into that.
When people think of burlesque, they think of American striptease. But if you look at it from a historical standpoint, it was a satire on current events, politics, and pop culture. The type of burlesque I do definitely pulls from that comical kind of striptease.
How did you choose your stage names?
HR: I was looking for something that celebrated my Mexican heritage. I grew up in a border town where everyone around me was Mexican. I repressed my identity for a long time. I was doing theater and people couldn’t make sense of me because I don’t have an accent. I was “Too Mexican for the Whites and too white for the Mexicans.” So when I came to drag I really wanted to honor it but also have fun with it.
LP: Much like Hector, I also want to celebrate my Latinx identity. I remember meeting a theater manager who said she didn’t know any good actors of color. I think she just didn’t know where to look!
Do you like having a day job?
HR: That’s a tricky question. I love being at BAM. I love what I do. Although I do think as a queer person I live more the life I want to when I’m in drag or when I’m in that circle.
LP: I have a musical theater background. I did a brief stint in Bachelor of Fine Arts until I realized it was not for me. I wanted a job that was going to feed me. And if I’m completely drained creatively, I don’t want to think about performing or creating a new act but that will still be fine.
HR: There’s something really relaxing about conforming.
LP: (Emphatically) Yeah!
HR: In the drag community half the people have day jobs. We do the night life as our artistic expression. What I find is you can perform your art part-time, but being an artist is always full-time.
LP: Yeah, you’re always thinking about it. There are so many levels of being an artist and practicing your artistry. You don’t have to be full-time for it to count. Daisy never turns off!
HR: Sometimes things happening at work feed into artistic ideas. But then there are times I have to put into my calendar: Do not think of drag!
LP: I think sometimes you need a break to create new ideas and not just look at the same thing over and over. Like if it’s a really busy week or month doing shows, at the end of it, I try to have one day off—no costuming, no listening to music.
Is your stage persona the real you? HR: A part of me lives my life code-switching. When I’m Flower I’m a different person from Hector. But there are similarities. Sometimes I want to reconcile them, sometimes I don’t. I think there’s something to be said about portraying a persona and what it means to be that persona—are you extending yourself or making it up in some way?
LP: I do think both are very personal art forms. You present a character that comes from within. I draw a lot of inspiration from my real life but I don’t present it in that way. I did this show once called “Do Both.” I had to do a talk for five minutes before I did my burlesque, and the subject was Latinx identity in the US, which is super personal. After I did it, I was like, this is such a weird experience that everyone knows my life story, everyone knows me on a personal level. And I thought I had crossed that barrier between Daisy and Leo and the audience had seen too much Leo for me to be Daisy again. After that I decided I’m never going to do that again, to make Leo so visible when I’m supposed to be Daisy.
HR: I totally understand. There’s a certain level of vulnerability that you don’t want to show audiences because you need to make them believe you’re the character you created. When I’m on stage I don’t talk about my personal life. Maybe I’ll throw in a dating joke every once in a while. But it’s never too personal.
But interestingly, drag also helped the real Hector. When I turned 21, I felt as a brown queer person, I was very outside the bubble of this white cis gay male community. I didn’t belong. I thought drag could make me not feel that way. And it did. Along the way I realized I’m really supplementing my self-esteem in drag, how much more comfortable I was in the social setting.
It is no secret that the cinema canon has historically skewed toward lionizing the white, male auteur. Beyond the Canon is a monthly series that seeks to question that history and broaden horizons by pairing one much-loved, highly regarded, canonized classic with a thematically or stylistically-related—and equally brilliant—work by a filmmaker traditionally excluded from that discussion. This month’s double feature pairs Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973) with Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960).
By Devika Girish
Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty is often described as an “African Godard.” His debut feature, Touki Bouki (1973), bears striking similarities to Jean-Luc Godard’s own firecracker first feature Breathless (1960). Both films center on a young couple as they swindle their way through the city with impossible, punk-ish cool; both are shot in a handheld, improvisatory style replete with jump-cuts.
But describing Mambéty in terms of Godard minimizes the former’s fierce originality and the historical rupture that separates the two auteurs. In the same year that Breathless premiered, setting the tone for the French New Wave, Senegal achieved independence from France. “The impulse for what I do came at that moment of liberation back in the 60s,” Mambéty once said, “and is inspired more by my understanding of the limits of possibility than by any developments or trends in European film at the time.” His seminal filmography railed against the postcolonial temptation to mimic the West and sought a distinctively homegrown, African grammar of aesthetics and politics.
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Djibril Diop Mambéty’sTouki Bouki
Godard’s Breathless is animated by an insouciant paradox: written on-the-fly and riddled with uneven pacing and direct addresses, it rebels against classical conventions, while also professing a deep love for the movies, especially Hollywood noirs. As petty thief Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a self-styled Humphrey Bogart, careens through Paris in stolen cars with his American girlfriend Patricia (Jean Seberg), Godard inundates the film with references from Budd Boetticher and Jean-Pierre Melville to Rilke and Bach. Although DP Raoul Coutard shot in natural light and with documentary immediacy, Paris becomes its own, romantic cliché in Breathless—a place contained entirely within the language of music, literature, and cinema.
In Touki Bouki, Mambéty pursues an inverse task: to give cinematic and musical utterance to the zeitgeist of a home rarely seen through the eyes of its own people during colonization. The film’s affectations stem from Mambéty’s intimate relation to Dakar, which he never left to live or study abroad, but which the film’s protagonists, Mory and his girlfriend Anta, ironically seek to escape. From a graphic opening inside an abattoir, Touki Bouki segues into verite scenes of the locals’ daily lives, and then turns to surreal satire as Mory (Magaye Niang) and Anta (Mareme Niang) try to rob the city’s wealthy socialites for a ticket to Paris. Mambéty modulates his techniques to capture Dakar’s postcolonial fragmentations, conjuring a hybrid iconography that feels unique to the time and place. Unlike the borrowed American swagger of Michel in Breathless, Mory’s Gothic cool is entirely his own: his bike is adorned with a zebu skull, a nod to his roots as a cowherd and his renegade flair.
If Breathless pre-echoes Godard’s mandate, “A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order,” Touki Bouki literalizes it with jagged experiments in montage: a bravura sequence intersperses oblique glimpses of love-making with crashing ocean waves and the skinning of a goat. But Mambéty’s structural inspiration comes from the African oral tradition. The film’s title derives from this mode of storytelling—“bouki” is Wolof for the trickster trope of the hyena—as does its sense of rigor. Even as Touki Bouki zigzags between plot events and tragicomic asides, it exhibits a tight, circular logic set to its layered soundtrack of avant-garde jazz, Western pop, African drums, and the flute. The film’s allegorical force is never beyond comprehension: in an unforgettable image, Mory stands naked atop a French car emblazoned with the American flag, singing a griot song.
Both Breathless and Touki Bouki share an existential malaise. In Godard’s film, it is the emptiness behind Michel’s hat and coat; a reminder that, in contrast to the psychological conventions of character, we are never privy to Michel’s identity or motivations. The malaise in Touki Bouki has a name and a sound: “Paris, Paris, Paris,” sings Josephine Baker on the soundtrack. Mambéty, who sadly only made one more feature (1992’s Hyenas) before his death at 53 in 1998, captured vividly the burden of the colonized: the corrupting allure of the metropole and illusions of one’s own inferiority. If Breathless is a heady exercise in style, Touki Bouki is an exercise in pathos. That Mambéty also did it with unparalleled style makes him a true original.
Devika Girish is a film critic and journalist with bylines in Film Comment, The Village Voice, Reverse Shot, MUBI’s Notebook, (SVLLY)wood and other outlets. She grew up in India and currently lives in New York. You can follow her on Twitter @devikagirgayi.
The black box Fishman Space in the BAM Fisher was built to be flexible, and since it opened in 2012, artists have come up with unexpected ways to test that flexibility. There have been shows in the round, on three sides, with the audience sitting on stage, with rocking chairs as seats, and with no seats at all. In the most recent Next Wave, for instance, there were productions that made audiences see the theater in completely new ways: Michelle Dorrance’s Elemental went above audience’s heads to dance on the lighting grids; Andrew Schneider’s NERVOUS/SYSTEM turned the theater into a magic lantern with each blackout revealing a new tableau; Jesper Just’s Interpassivities made audience walk on “terra infirma” the whole time. And this Pride Weekend, it will become a nightclub with Everybooty.
So how do we bring these artists’ ceaseless creative ideas to the stage? The secret lies with our ingenious production managers/supervisors, Collins Costa and Courtney Wrenn. Here, they reveal their magic.
Collins, can you take us through the unique challenges of these shows?
Collins Costa:Interpassivities had only done previous shows at warehouses and museums because Jesper was mainly a visual artist. So it required more hand-holding than usual. They already had the flooring and video. But they had to construct walls in our space. Because they didn’t have a lot of theater experience, we helped them work out the mechanics.
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Collins Costa
Michelle Dorrance’s show, Elemental, was in development the whole summer, including a two-week residency in the Fisher. That was very helpful to both of us. From the get-go, she wanted to do an in-the-round show. She wanted to ziplining in instruments, dancing on the grid, playing with water. A lot of those “elements” did in fact come to fruition. They were told about our capabilities, including the hours they could have with the crew, and they made the best use of it.
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Aaron Marcellus in the Dorrance Dance production Elemental during the BAM Next Wave Festival, 2018. Photo: Ian Douglas
When we first booked NERVOUS/SYSTEM, it was in-the-round. But a few months in, they said they had to change to a proscenium show and the stage would cut into seating. But those seats were already sold. Eventually we came up with the traverse seating with added seats on the other side of the stage. They also needed to fly in props during the blackouts, which the Fisher was not built for. After some research we worked out a system for them.
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Jamie Roach, Kedian Keohan and Peter Musante in the Andrew Schneider production NERVOUS/SYSTEM during the BAM Next Wave Festival, 2018. Photo: Rebecca Smeyne
How does a production manager at BAM work out what is needed to put on a show? CC: In theory, the company will first send us a “tech rider,” which is a document of what they believe their production need is. I’ll create a budget based on that document. So the role of a production manager is to look at a document, make an estimate of how many crew and how much time it will take to make it happen, and if/how much you need to spend on materials and equipment rentals. Sometimes we can’t make it happen within our budget, then we go back to the company with suggestions.
What is the essence of a production manager’s job?
CC: You take the artistic ideas from a company, then you work out the boring side: how to get it into the space, how long will it take to get into the space, what do I need to provide equipment-wise, personnel-wise, so it can happen the way the artists imagine it. And you take it all the way until the show is finished.
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Abigail Simon and Jin Zhang in the Jesper Just Production Interpassivities during the BAM Next Wave Festival, 2018. Photo: Jin Zhang
What is the unique challenge of the Fisher? CC: Because it’s so small, maximizing audience size is always paramount. But the point of a versatile space is to play with it. The Fisher shows, compared to those in our two other houses, have a higher percentage of new productions—those that haven’t been in many other theaters. They may have workshopped elsewhere. But we can provide larger resources to realize their vision. Our default attitude is to say yes, then we work out the solutions.
Everybooty is a show/party that BAM curates and produce in-house, which is unusual for us as a presenter. Courtney, how do you work out the challenges? Courtney Wrenn: I am very invested in Everybooty, so when I knew we were producing it I wanted to be on the curatorial team. So I’ve been planning since the beginning, thinking about what actors to bring in and how to move them. Those conversations have been ongoing since January.
I’ve been working hard with artists individually. This show is based on a nightlife performance. These performers don’t usually have the resources that the Fisher can provide, so I worked with them on problem solving. I took a more active role in their creative process.
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Everybooty, 2018. Photo: Santiago Felipe
Where did you get the expertise? CW: I toured nationally with the Broadway shows Ghost and Sister Act as a prop person. I also worked at the Delacorte Theater in the Central Park. Each space has its own challenges and I have seen a lot of them.
I think It’s important to admit what you don’t know. The internet is always great. Our production team has 13 people and everybody has a different strength. For instance, I was a prop person. Ryan [Gastelum] was a sound designer. Paul [Bartlett] and Brian [Sciarra] were lighting designers. Dylan [Nachand] and Palmer [Johnston] came from rock shows. There’s a real depth, and we are collaborative. I don’t think we have encountered a situation in which you pose a question to 13 of us and we’re completely stumped.
What are the qualities that make one a good production manager? CW: We have different styles. We deal with problems differently. But qualities inherent in all of us are flexibility, resourcefulness, and productive attitudes. Something is always going to go wrong before curtain… so rolling with the punches is a good attitude to have.
It is no secret that the cinema canon has historically skewed toward lionizing the white, male auteur. Beyond the Canon is a monthly series that seeks to question that history and broaden horizons by pairing one much-loved, highly regarded, canonized classic with a thematically or stylistically-related—and equally brilliant—work by a filmmaker traditionally excluded from that discussion. This month’s double feature pairs three films by Maya Deren with David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001).
By Shelley Farmer
Without Maya Deren, the filmmaker widely recognized as the mother of American avant-garde cinema, there is no David Lynch. Their works overlap both thematically—in their interest in doubles, dance, and the darkness underlying the mundane—as well as in visual and formal aspects: their use of mirror imagery, negative photography, and superimposition, to their dreamlike narrative logic and pacing.
In shorts such as the iconic “Meshes of the Afternoon,” (1943) “At Land,” (1944) “And Ritual in Transfigured Time,” (1946) the Ukrainian-born Deren synthesizes cinema, dance, design, and mid-century avant-garde traditions, as well as both American and European sensibilities. Meanwhile, the American Lynch explores a sort of specifically American grotesquerie, unearthing the surreal in genres from soaps to crime films. In Mulholland Drive (2001), Lynch borrows from and blasts open the film noir tradition, using markers of the genre to create an off-kilter portrait of the despair underlying Hollywood’s sheen.
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Maya Deren's "Meshes of the Afternoon" (1943)
Deren and Lynch are both most closely identified with the more overtly surrealistic aspects of their work, with hooded figures with mirrors for faces in “Meshes of the Afternoon” and a spot-lit man with oversized limbs in Mulholland Drive. But perhaps what unites their work most is their ability to conjure a sense of reality slightly off its axis. Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky coined the term ostranenie, frequently translated to English as “defamiliarization.”
Much of what occurs in Mulholland Drive doesn’t stretch the bounds of logic or reality, and would fit comfortably in a more traditional genre film. In Lynch’s film, heroine Betty, a bright-eyed Hollywood hopeful new to Los Angeles, becomes entangled with raven-haired amnesiac Rita. In the movie's striking “Llorando” sequence, in which Naomi Watts’ Betty and Laura Harring’s Rita watch a lip-synced performance in a nearly-empty theater. With the use of extreme close-ups, echoing sound, and the dissonant image of a woman emoting deeply to a voice that isn’t her own, the scene gains a dreamlike edge of unreality. Even the performance styles of the actors throughout the film, with their acting styles pitched somewhere north of natural, imbue genre plot beats with an uncanny feeling.
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Laura Harring in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001)
Similarly, in Deren’s “Ritual in Transfigured Time,” an unnatural breeze, slightly slowed motion, and an ominously judgmental figure in the background of a shot all make the quotidian domestic task of spinning twine feel unnatural. Later, slowed footage and lightly stylized movement transform the simple task of winding one’s way through a crowded party into a dream ballet.
Beyond their stylistic echoes, both Mulholland Drive and Deren’s shorts in this program center women protagonists. Lynch’s film exists within a tradition of male auteurs’ cinematic dreams starring women who mirror and meld and cannibalize each other, from Robert Altman’s Three Women to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona to Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating.
But where many of those women feel like symbols or inscrutable ciphers, Lynch—who frequently toes the line between empathizing with women’s suffering and exploiting it—here does more than create a puzzle with his mirrored women, but uses that mirroring to dig into the subjectivity of his lead character. As the phantom love of Betty and Rita gives way to the crumbling romance of Diane Selwyn and Camilla Rhodes, Lynch’s doubling of the women and details between the two stories creates a wrenching portrait of a woman driven by passion and jealousy to destroy both her lover and herself.
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Naomi Watts and Laura Herring in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001)
Deren takes this excavation of a woman’s inner life even further by frequently casting herself, wading through her own dreamscapes, and—in “Meshes of the Afternoon”—even pursuing her own doppelgangers. In her silent shorts, the central women—whether Deren herself or “Ritual in Transfigured Time”’s Rita Christiani—wordlessly move through disorienting landscapes that shift and transform around them, pursuing and interacting with figures unknown or not quite human, discovering objects that appear seemingly without reason. These singular works, rife with symbolism and operating by their own rules of time and space, drop the viewer deep into the realm of a woman’s subconscious.
The works of Deren and Lynch aren’t simple to describe. Their movies are defined by a language that is purely cinematic. Manipulating time and movement, they illustrate the ineffable in films as uneasy, slippery, and wondrous as dreams.
Shelley Farmer is the publicity manager for film at BAM. She is also a performer and writer with bylines at Slate, Roger Ebert, Paper Magazine, Reverse Shot, and Indiewire. You can find her work at shelleyfarmer.com
It is no secret that the cinema canon has historically skewed toward lionizing the white, male auteur. Beyond the Canon is a monthly series that seeks to question that history and broaden horizons by pairing one much-loved, highly regarded, canonized classic with a thematically or stylistically-related—and equally brilliant—work by a filmmaker traditionally excluded from that discussion. This month’s double feature pairs Haifaa al-Mansour’s Wadjda (2012) with Wim Wenders’ Alice in the Cities (1974).
By Simran Hans
The bicycle is Christmas tree–green and shiny, its ribbon-festooned handlebars wrapped in new-toy plastic. It is the bike of 10-year-old Wadjda’s (Waad Mohammed) daydreams, so perfect it’s as though she wished it into existence. It appears like a dream, too, seeming to cycle itself along a brick wall. The bike, it turns out, is being carried by a truck; it’s not a magic trick after all. She follows the bike to find it for sale, priced at a very real 800 riyal.
In the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, little girls weren’t allowed to ride bikes until 2013 (the ban was lifted a year after Wadjda’s release). Still, Wadjda imagines herself cycling, racing her best friend, a little boy named Abdullah (Abdullrahman Al Gohani), and winning. In writer-director Haifaa al-Mansour’s 2012 fiction debut, the entrepreneurial Wadjda’s get-rich-quick schemes to purchase the bike include selling hand-braided bracelets and delivering notes at school, but when she sees that a Quran recital competition has a prize of 1000 riyal, she signs up for “religious club.” This little girl is taking matters into her own hands.
The little girl in Wim Wenders’ 1974 road movie Alice in the Cities is a little younger than Wadjda. We meet 9-year-old Alice (Yella Rottländer) in the revolving door of an airport. She chases the film’s protagonist, German journalist Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler), in playful circles, foreshadowing the rings she will run around him in the coming days. Shortly after this meeting, her mother, Lisa (Lisa Kreuzer), leaves her in Philip’s charge as the three journey separately from New York back to West Germany, via Amsterdam. It is Alice who will lead them to her grandmother’s house in Wuppertal, telling her driver “When I see it, I will know.” Alice thinks she is in charge, too.
Al-Mansour is particularly interested in those who seize their own destinies; she tells stories about rebellious young women and their attempts to liberate themselves from their conservative environments. At the time of its release, Wadjda was widely praised for breaking new ground; it is the first feature to be shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, and the first feature-length Saudi film to be directed by a woman. Al-Mansour had to direct all outside scenes from within a van, communicating with her crew via a monitor and a walkie-talkie. Her next feature, The Perfect Candidate, which will premiere at the Venice International Film Festival next month, is a comedy-drama about a Saudi woman who runs for office in a local election.
If Al-Mansour is obsessed with those constricted by society, Wenders might be described as training his eye on those who choose to leave it behind. Both filmmakers are drawn to characters who seem out of step with their surroundings. In Alice, it’s Winter who doesn’t fit, a tourist in America, the polaroid camera that hangs around his neck a buffer between him and the world. In Al-Mansour’s, it’s Wadjda who is the outsider, wide shots often depict her alone, the sole figure in shot. Yet though Wadjda’s separateness is visually emphasised, her expression remains hopeful. Speaking to NPR, Al-Mansour emphasised that while many films about the Middle East depict its horrors, it was important to her “to make a film that is happy.”
A bike would allow Wadjda to participate in the games from which she’s otherwise been excluded. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that Al-Mansour chooses the bicycle as Wadjda’s totem. This, along with her use of real locations, non-professional actors, and a child protagonist who bears witness to the problems of the present day, means Wadjda both recalls and references Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves, another film that invests symbolic power and the promise of social mobility in the bicycle.
“Children have a sort of admonitory function in my films: to remind you [that] with curiosity and lack of prejudice it is possible to look at the world,” said Wenders in his 2001 essay and interview collection On Film. Wadjda, like Alice, performs this function. The patriarchal culture that governs Wadjda’s world doesn’t make sense to her. Her brow crinkles with confusion when an old man catcalls her in the street; her jaw visibly drops when her teacher reveals her pre-arranged plan for the prize money. “And if you disagree over anything, refer it to Allah and the messenger,” mumbles Wadjda, without conviction, unable to speak words she doesn’t believe.
It is no secret that the cinema canon has historically skewed toward lionizing the white, male auteur. Beyond the Canon is a monthly series that seeks to question that history and broaden horizons by pairing one much-loved, highly regarded, canonized classic with a thematically or stylistically-related—and equally brilliant—work by a filmmaker traditionally excluded from that discussion. This month’s double feature pairs Valie Export’s Invisible Adversaries (1977) with Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).
By Courtney Duckworth
Women are always doppelgängers. Critic John Berger wrote that a woman is “almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself” through a prickly self-surveillance. Such double vision imbues the oeuvre of Austrian artist-agitator Valie Export—an alias she adopted to shed the encumbering surnames of father and ex-husband—who gummed up masculine voyeurism with her puckish, impertinent performances of the 1960s and ’70s. Export’s energetic experiments infuse Invisible Adversaries (1977), her debut feature, a brisk bricolage of improvised dialogue, sight gags, (re)staged performances, grainy documentary footage, and reenactments of her studio practice that together, she said, “put alternative artistic media into a discourse with conventional film.”
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Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Threading through this mélange is a cheapie science-fiction plot—one that pre-echoes Philip Kaufman’s Hollywood horror Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). Both movies open on a woman who suspects those around her are being supplanted by obscure, hostile forces, perhaps aliens; and both struggle to verify their subjective experiences. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Elizabeth (Brooke Adams) observes her slacker live-in boyfriend become a slick, suited automaton overnight. When she brings her concerns to Matthew (Donald Sutherland), a coworker at the health department with whom she shares an unsubtle flirtation, he seeks help from a series of “objective” authorities: policemen, a psychoanalyst (a stony, impassable Leonard Nimoy), the mayor of San Francisco, where they live. In the meantime, Elizabeth becomes enervated, drained of narrative influence, drugged into obedient sleep. Even when she tries to connect with another woman who also believes her lover has “changed,” she is dragged away and urged to be sensible. She can’t forge a connection with other women. Because it is sometimes unclear when the people around her become “pods”—the name for their alien doubles—it is ambiguous whether they treat her concerns derisively because they are part of the spreading, invasive conspiracy or because she is being treated as a hysterical female, incapable of accurate perceptions.
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Invisible Adversaries (1977)
In Invisible Adversaries, Anna (Susanne Widl) tells her inamorato (Peter Weibel, Export’s real-life ex-lover, who also co-wrote the film) of her fears about the “Hyksos”—the name for their alien doubles—but she doesn’t look to him to validate her subjective perceptions. Instead, she interrogates the change she sees in herself and the world around her through artmaking, philosophical and sociopolitical inquiries, and conversations with other women, including the pioneering artist Helke Sander, who appears in a recording to answer the question, When is a human being a woman?” Anna wonders whether the Hyksos exist in reality or are the result of a psychic projection. Anna’s mental state is represented through disjunctive montage and motifs of doubling: she encounters a prone cardboard cutout of herself.
Both movies depict dissolving relationships and the way private issues spiral out in the public sphere. Elizabeth gets mad at her pre-Pod boyfriend for not picking up his dirty clothes off the floor, while Anna complains to Peter that while he spouts strident revolutionary ideals, he doesn’t even know how to make eggs and requires her to whip up his meals. In one escalating montage, the latter fight between Anna and Peter is intercut with the disputes between other couples, including her family and friends, before being spliced with documentary footage of explosions and war-torn cities, suggesting the permeability between public and private. This permeability was especially load-bearing in a decade when the public issue of open war was brought increasingly into private, conspiratorial rooms.
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Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
In many ways, Invasion has resonances of Watergate and the disillusionment immediately following the Vietnam War, which had ended three years before the film’s release. In Invisible Adversaries, the conviction that the government is not to be trusted—and that anyone could harbor secret enmity—derives from the haunting remnants of Nazi influence pervading Austrian public life. Anna overhears references to names like Henriette von Schirach (sympathetic ex-wife of the head of the Hitler Youth) and Hans-Ulrich Rudel (a neo-Nazi colonel occupying government positions in West Germany), and she and Peter see jackbooted riot police throng the streets.
Pods and Hyskos are a threat from within—from within the domestic sphere, within women themselves, and within countries that allow remnants of fascism to flourish. Both films thus create a strong sense of paranoia and utilize the motifs of eyes and gazes. For instance, in Invasion, Matthew is first introduced through a peephole. The threat seems to spread everywhere. Watching both films, you might wonder how long these threats have been going on. Rewatching Invasion, notice that the garbage truck that carts off undesirables is present in one of the first shots; similarly, the scream the Pods emit when witnessing those unlike them is buried in the sound mix from the beginning. Invisible Adversaries has similarly harsh, grating sounds and a thrumming electronic score. Both build their paranoia from a whisper to a buzz to a full-on scream, making us wonder if these abuses of power are new—or if we are just now noticing them.
It is no secret that the cinema canon has historically skewed toward lionizing the white, male auteur. Beyond the Canon is a monthly series that seeks to question that history and broaden horizons by pairing one much-loved, highly regarded, canonized classic with a thematically or stylistically-related—and equally brilliant—work by a filmmaker traditionally excluded from that discussion. This month’s double feature pairs Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends (1978) with John Cassavetes’ Husbands (1970).
By Chloe Lizotte
At the beginning of Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends (1978), Susan (Melanie Mayron) bursts into a laundromat to tell her best friend Anne (Anita Skinner) that her photographs were selected for a gallery show. Riding on Susan’s high, Anne shares her own personal news: she’s engaged to her bland suburbanite boyfriend (Bob Balaban). “How can you be sure when you’re so unsure?” Susan asks Anne, as their mundane surroundings clash with the fragility of imminent change.
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Girlfriends (1978)
Uncertainty is the norm in Weill’s New York: rites of passage don’t necessarily offer clarity, and momentary vulnerability might collapse into a dead end. Set before the days of Working Girl corner offices, Girlfriends animates second-wave feminist trade-offs between artistic careers and personal lives. Coping with Anne’s irreplaceability in their lonely two-bedroom, Susan pursues her photography while quietly seeking connection; elsewhere, the supposed safety net of Anne’s marriage encroaches on the personal space she needs to write—and be herself. Independence, despite its unnerving lack of reassurance, proved a virtue for Weill who made Girlfriends outside of Hollywood studio infrastructures. Weill felt studios might have relegated Susan—Jewish and unfocused on romantic resolution—to a sardonic sidekick. Overcoming three years of budgetary setbacks and piecemeal shooting, Weill and screenwriter Vicki Polon hew vividly and faithfully to the textures of Susan’s unmoored twenties, so rooted in unspoken shorthands and awkward disconnects.
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Husbands (1970)
Not that Columbia Pictures blindly put up the money for the existentialist testosterone of John Cassavetes’ Husbands (1970)—they acquired it long after Cassavetes charmed funding from an Italian count in the afterglow of his Academy Award-nominated drama Faces (1968). Husbands also charts self-reckoning precipitated by loss. Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, and Cassavetes play Long Island dads who launch into a desperate bender after their close friend (Gena’s brother David Rowlands, in hammy pool party photos) suddenly dies of a heart attack. Cassavetes’ affection for middle-class fortysomething men is out of sync with the 1970 zeitgeist, more likely to identify with dropout youth or oppressed housewives, but this enhances a sense of outsider drift within archetypes of conformity. Like Girlfriends, the film stems as uniquely from its social moment—here, the suburban wake of women’s liberation—as it does from its independent production. Cassavetes, initially moved by the death of his older brother, wrote the film through extensive rehearsals with Falk and Gazzara, who impart their own temperaments to the characters' swings of affectionate boorishness and searching inarticulacy.
Both films find rhythm in listlessness: Susan’s post-Anne life becomes a collage of possibility, both freeing and suffocating, especially in bursts of desire. Weill finds a capricious incoherence in grasping for an anchor in someone else, and toggles between moments of impulse and retreat. Susan’s tipsy flirtation with a middle-aged rabbi (Eli Wallach) gives her an ephemeral thrill, but his family life soon reframes his pangs of want as pangs of escapism. While Susan modulates the outside noise to find, and hold, her own center, the men of Husbands try to lose themselves by acting out. Rebuffing respectability and hygiene, they run scrappy races on 72nd Street and jet to England on a whim; in sprawling sequences, they get obscenely drunk and rag on strangers at bars and instigate hellish one-night stands. The unforgiving length of these scenes strands them in the grief they’re trying to avoid, but that expressionism lets them inflict their powerlessness upon others (occasionally without bit performers’ knowledge that film was rolling). Yet Weill flips this dynamic in lower-key, everyday scenarios. Through characters like Wallach’s, and even through Susan’s platonic friends, she sketches the power imbalances of using someone for fleeting personal liberation, then drops her characters back at square one.
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Girlfriends (1978)
Husbands traces a pervasive alienation in peripheral characters—an anxiously laughing dental patient or Gazzara’s fatigued wife can linger as forcefully as the main trio. Yet minor characters imply deeper personal stakes in Girlfriends, seeming so crucial for an instant before unexpectedly losing touch. Though Weill would only go on to direct one more theatrically released feature (1980's sparky, underrated It's My Turn), and her name is invoked far less frequently these days than Cassavetes, Girlfriends inspired a crucial cinematic lineage of New York women thanks to its focus on the unpredictable: Melanie Mayron’s infectious grin lights up Susan’s upswings, but she often has to adjust her expectations, as when a gallery owner cuts a favorite photo from her show. While shedding control and weathering change, Susan cultivates what’s left over.
Chloe Lizotte is a writer whose work has been featured in Film Comment, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Reverse Shot, and Screen Slate. She lives in New York, and you can follow her on Twitter @celizotte.
The highest compliment to Michael Keegan-Dolan’s choreography? It makes you want to get up on stage and dance alongside his company, Teaċ Daṁsa. Its kinetic simplicity and emotional lucidity are irresistible and highly relatable. Swan Lake/Loch na hEala (Harvey Theater at BAM Strong, Oct 15—20) presents a rare chance to catch this internationally praised director/choreographer’s work stateside.
In Swan Lake, big chunks of dance—performed to hypnotic, live Irish/Norwegian music by Slow Moving Clouds—intermix with searing dramatic scenes to spin out a modern variant on the classic tale, albeit comprising several narrative strands (Keegan-Dolan cites the classic source; the Irish myth of King Lir, whose wife transforms their four children into swans; and the contemporary tragedy of a downtrodden man, John Carthy). It’s engrossing dance-theater in which ensemble movement sections—healing rituals, greek choruses—play a major part, acting in effect as the work’s heart.
Keegan-Dolan’s movement could be called “emotional weather.” It captures whatever pathos is conjured by the drama at hand, either amplifying it or, alternately, acting as a method of healing or bonding. The dance is so entwined with the music as to be inseparable. They whirl, blend, and expand, suffusing the space with a feeling or thought, and engulfing the audience. In a key duet, the pair first expresses timidity and apprehension at engagement; this evolves into physical tests of trust, romantic delectation, and sheer bliss. The man’s childlike physical reaction to this bliss is sublime, clearly novel to him, and bereft of any physical or psychological artifice.
Keegan-Dolan, of Ireland, studied classical forms of dance, but you might not necessarily garner that from watching Swan Lake. Passages of spinning, pulsing, and snaking torsos evoke an ecstatic rave with everyday movements and folk dance. The similarly folk-infused music’s rhythms play out through stamping, hopping, and hands flicked to the beat. The dancers often face the audience and move as one, or they pair off and focus on one another, reinforcing the idea of the ensemble as an empathetic community. As phrases build and repeat, a contagious sense of abandon and delirium takes hold. Make no mistake—there is plenty of darkness in Swan Lake, but it’s fairly balanced by delight.
In an interview for Sadler’s Wells in London, where he is an associate artist, Keegan-Dolan noted that while learning his style, “sensitivity is a huge thing, and takes time to cultivate... the ability to perform these big external gross movements, and the ability to perform the finest, smallest, tiniest movements and to have the ability to project those tiny movements over big spaces.” It’s this combination of grand gesture and filigree—plus a generous, essential sense of community—that make viewers want to join in.
Larry Ossei-Mensah (Left) and Glenn Kaino (Right) in front of Blue
Larry Ossei-Mensah, Ghanaian-American curator and cultural critic, is guest curator of The Rudin Family Gallery at BAM Strong, BAM’s first dedicated visual art space. Larry sat down with the inaugural gallery artist, Los Angeles-born conceptual artist Glenn Kaino, to talk about the exhibition. Larry Ossei-Mensah: Tell me about what you try to do as a visual artist.
Glenn Kaino: I use the idea of what I believe art can be, along with theories of art and artistic engagement, to create connections between systems of knowledge that don’t normally connect.
LOM: Can you expound on what you mean by that?
GK: I think some of the nuances of our humanity and our role as creative thinkers is being lost because of the way information is now catalogued and organized in very systematic ways. I believe that art has the ability to open channels of communication, as opposed to closing down connections that don’t “fit” or map perfectly. Things don’t have to make sense in the landscape of art. Art is the space between knowing and where invention can happen.
LOM: Over the span of your career, are there any projects that you view as being milestones or turning points in affirming this approach?
GK: There have been a few projects that have resonated with my approach in more substantial ways. In New York City, my 2004 Whitney Biennial piece titled Desktop Operation (There’s No Place Like Home; 10th Example of Rapid Dominance/Em City) was an ephemeral sand sculpture in which I had to negotiate not just the process of that work coming into existence, but making it in the early stages of a market dominated era of the art world and an early stage of my career.
Also, the project I did for Prospect.3 called Tank affirmed this notion of putting together a unique set of collaborating elements, as well as investigating an idea in a very rigorous way physically, formally and philosophically.
And of course, my long-term collaboration with Olympian Tommie Smith, who in 1968 raised his hand after he won the gold medal in the Men’s 200m. We’ve done educational workshops together with young people, teaching them about art and activism, it’s been very rewarding—all in the effort of creating a bridge from the past to the present.
GK: I had been talking with Tommie Smith about plants and seeds as metaphors for multi-generational political narratives, and I found myself at a dinner listening to Bishop T.D. Jakes talk about repotting plants as a metaphor for the creative mind’s need for expansion and growth. At the end of the evening, one of the young guests at the table asked him how we could help, and he didn’t have a clear answer. It struck me then that someone as significant and developed in their career as Bishop Jakes, a metaphorical forest, might still also benefit from a repotting.
Then I found myself thinking about the political work we’re doing in my studio and ruminating about our country’s history—specifically the tools of our democratic system. Perhaps we are at the moment when some of the tools of representation and democracy, that were invented when this country was a seedling, are out of date, and need to be rethought or repotted.
Spill, 2019, Hydrocal, Regenerative Soil, and Pedestal; two bells: 44.75 x 44.75 x 36 in.
LOM: Can you talk a little about re-exhibiting your piece from 2000, Blue, and how it complements Spill?
GK: When I first conceived of that work years ago, one of the inspirations was the notion of the resolution of difference. From afar, the wave machines rock at the exact same rate and the waves look very similar because the material rocks back and forth in unison, and then when you walk closer it becomes apparent that all of the waves are uniquely different and create their own visual signature. The original work was about creating a circumstance where one would be able to instantly resolve between the two modes of seeing, the group and the individual elements. The viewer would situate themselves naturally in this space between. I think it’s a good compliment to Spill and it is still a relevant dialogue to have given where we’re at today.
Blue, 2000, Wave machines, wood shelves, and calibrator; twenty-two units: 6 x 18 x 5 in.
LOM: Were there any challenges as you were thinking through what would be the appropriate works for this endeavor?
GK: The responsibility and challenge of opening up a space is something I take seriously. No one has seen the gallery before—and a good part of the inaugural effort is experimenting and determining what volume might hold the space, like a recast of the Liberty Bell, while engaging in a dialogue with the audience. What I tried to do when working with you was to select works that would take the form of a meditative condition, knowing this space was designed to be somewhat transitory.
LOM: And you mentioned opening up a space. What’re your feelings around being the inaugural artist for The Rudin Family Gallery?
GK: I’m excited to be the first artist working in the space. It’s an honor. BAM is an institution that’s rich in history, and I’m proud to be part of it.
Glenn Kaino (Left) and Larry Ossei-Mensah (Right) working on exhibition planning
LOM: I’m intrigued by this opportunity to present at BAM. There are many creative intersections—theater, dance, performance—sometimes there’s a tendency to silo them, and this is an opportunity to break that open. What do you want people who see the work, whether it's on their way to a play or visiting intentionally, to walk away with?
GK: My practice aspires to ask big questions rather than provide small answers. If I was to encourage anyone to come see the work, it’s because it’s meant to be in dialogue with the audience, everything else going on at BAM, the street, the city, and the country; and in doing so, in dialogue with the world.
SeeWhen A Pot Finds Its Purpose at The Rudin Family Gallery (651 Fulton St) from November 6 through December 15, 2019.
At some point, most film programmers working in theatrical exhibition will be confronted with a question: what, exactly, to do with a film of unconventional length? It’s hard to give a concrete answer. At BAM, we’re proud to showcase short films at our annual BAMcinemaFest. We’ll sometimes slot a short or mid-length film alongside a feature, or include multi-artist shorts programs in our curated series. We might also dedicate an evening to celebrate the short- and mid-length work of a single filmmaker, as we’ve done recently with brilliant artists like Sky Hopinka, Ephraim Asili, and Kevin Jerome Everson. This question was at the forefront of my mind at this year’s Sundance Film Festival in January, when I emerged into the chilly Utah air after experiencing Garrett Bradley’s extraordinary visual poem America, which in 30 wordless, balletic, ceaselessly arresting minutes does nothing less than construct a joyous alternative history of African-American representation on screen.
I knew that we had to showcase this film at BAM, and the answer I came up with—working in concert with Garrett herself, my BAM colleagues, and Field of Vision—is the program you’re reading about now. America will screen once on seven consecutive days, each time accompanied by a different complementary component geared toward further enriching Bradley’s ambitious cine-historical project. (On closing night, we’re also pleased to present a retrospective of Bradley’s non-America work to date.)
The series begins on October 11 with two stunning slices of film Blackness separated by 106 years. America is preceded by the oldest-known Black-cast feature, Lime Kiln Club Field Day (1913), which stars the legendary Black vaudevillian performer Bert Williams (1874—1922). Williams—a complicated and compelling figure whose legacy has been wrestled over by film historians—appears as an inspirational, archival flicker in Bradley’s film, but is the main show in this lost-and-found feature, which was restored and first presented by Museum of Modern Art in 2014. The live score for Lime Kiln Club Field Day will be performed by percussionists Darrian Douglas and the legendary Jimmy Cobb, a one-time player with Miles Davis. The films will be followed by a discussion between Bradley and the historian Dr. Saidiya V. Hartman, who was recently named a 2019 MacArthur Fellow for her outstanding work "tracing the afterlife of slavery in modern American life and rescuing from oblivion stories of sparsely documented lives that have been systematically excluded from historical archives."
On night two (Oct 12)America pairs with two shorts by the legendary LA Rebellion filmmaker Julie Dash—a dance performance set to the soulful sounds of Nina Simone (1975’s Four Women; Dash’s debut), and Illusions (1982), a haunting study of power, privilege, and racial “passing” set in the classic Hollywood era. Dash and Bradley will be in conversation following the screening.
Via carefully chosen archive footage, the spirit of Bert Williams infuses and animates Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), the Oscar-nominated debut documentary by RaMell Ross, which screens with America on day three (Oct 13). Following the screening, Ross and Bradley will discuss how their aesthetic practice, and their drive to plot a new course for Black onscreen representation, has been informed by plunging into the archive.
On night four (Oct 14), America's beautiful balletic energy—its two main stars Edward Spots and Donna Crump are professional contemporary dancers—is complemented by the classic Hollywood musical Stormy Weather (1943), which boasts an amazing wealth of Black talent including Lena Horne, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Cab Calloway and, most memorably, the legendary Nicholas Brothers. Their climactic performance here contains several gravity and logic-defying moves: please don’t try to replicate them on your way out of the cinema!
Night five (Oct 15), meanwhile, places America on a continuum with "Race films," hundreds of which were made specifically for Black audiences and featured predominantly Black casts, in the first half of the 20th century. Many are now lost, but some remain. Here, two vintage, eccentric portraits of Black life animated by religion and jazz (Yamekraw and Hellbound Train, both 1930) complement Bradley's exquisite vision of a lost past. This program will be introduced by Ina D. Archer, Media Conservation & Digitization Assistant, Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History & Culture.
More esteemed guests will gather on the series’ penultimate evening (Oct 16), a collaboration with, and precursor to, this year’s edition of the Black Portraiture[s] conference, which runs at NYU from October 17—19. Following a screening of America, professors Michael B. Gillespie, Nicole R. Fleetwood, and Racquel J. Gates will converge to reflect on the historical and contemporary significance of the sumptuous images and compelling themes offered up by Bradley’s film.
The program’s closing night (Oct 17) is dedicated to spotlighting Bradley’s work, including a shorts program, and a rare screening of her luminous debut feature Below Dreams (2014). It’s the final stop—for now—on a journey of race, time, and superlative filmmaking. We hope you come along for the ride.
Ashley Clark is BAM’s senior repertory and special film programmer
Our BAMkids programming, which inspires young audiences with a delightful and diverse lineup of concerts, workshops, movie matinees, and live performances for kids ages 2—11, begins October 20 and runs through December 7. We spoke with Steven McIntosh, the lead curator and BAM’s Director of Family Programs, about what he’s looking forward to this season. Can you give us an overview of BAMkids and tell us what makes it so special and relevant? Well, there’s no question there is a lot of art that’s accessible individually or through media at home, but BAM is a communal home for art. I think that for some of our audiences, both old and new, it's the added enjoyment of encountering a story, music, laughter, movement, or beauty with other people—or even appreciating the creativity of their fellow audience members, who engage with the art as well.
Do you think that engagement is a way in which our kids programming is in line with BAM’s mission, which is to be a home for adventurous art, audiences, and ideas? Definitely. A BAMkids experience is not a passive experience. BAM's mission is to be an adventurous home for audiences and it's really important for families to know that their experience at BAM is as much about what they do in the space as it is what the artists are doing. Like a great adventure it's meant to capture all of their senses so they can let go of the busyness and the to-do lists of their lives, and really just focus on who they are and how the art makes them feel.
Can you walk us through this season, starting with Brooklyn’s own web-slinging superhero, in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse? Sure. So, it’s the story of this young boy, Miles Morales, who—I’m sure many are familiar with his tale—gets bitten by a radioactive spider and is set on this journey of what it means to be a hero. What I love about this film is that it introduces audiences to the multiverse. Miles is one Spider-Man of many in different universes, and he gets to come in contact with and work with these various versions to take on a common enemy. You’ll find this with all of the films we’re showing: Heroism, or being courageous, isn’t something you can do on your own. You need a community around us to do it. I also love it because it has a fresh storyline, phenomenal animation, and a playlist-worthy soundtrack.
Can you tell me about Okko’s Inn? This came from Jesse Trussell, one of our film programmers. It’s directed by Kitarō Kōsaka, who’s a protege of arguably one of the greatest animators of all time, Hayao Miyazaki. I feel this story in particular is really special because it deals with a sort of unimaginable loss. This young person loses their parents and out of this unimaginable grief, conjures a certain magic that only comes from the human spirit. It’s a highly creative journey, a really magical story originally from a Japanese children’s book. There may be things that our audiences might find surprising, just culturally—there are a lot of different stories out there, in this case, non-Western ones. I think it’s going to be a treat.
Let’s switch over to music. What can you tell me about Lucy Kalantari & the Jazz Cats? We’re really excited to have Lucy. She’s been on the wish list for a while—even before she won a Grammy! This is going to be a dance- and sing-along concert. She incorporates playful scatting, and it’s all Jazz Age–inspired music. She already sounds great on recordings, but she is someone you definitely want to see live. She’s authentic, she’s got a great voice, she really cares and engages the audience. It’s a show for our youngest audience members, so in a way it’s kind of for the parents. You want to create moments that you will remember through the haze of child-rearing—and I think this will be one of them.
Let’s talk about Get Up, Stand Up! We’ve done this before, and it’s always wonderful. I’d have to say Get Up, Stand Up! concerts have provided some of my most memorable experiences here, not just as a programmer, but as an audience member. This program is curated by Mikal Lee, our Education Manager, and what he’s done is he took the hip-hop and social justice elements that are so central to our popular Word. Sound. Power. event and he created a program that’s age appropriate for younger audiences, allowing them to engage with that art form and the revolutionary aspects of hip-hop. It’ll be a blow-the-roof-off performance. You are going to be on your feet. It’ll be great for the kids, and possibly even better for the adults.
Next in the lineup is the film Queen of Katwe. This is a great Disney film. It’s this uplifting true story of a young girl from Uganda whose world changes when she discovers chess; I find this film special because it’s not your typical female empowerment story. You have this phenomenal woman whose world has been marginalized in so many ways, and her life and relationships with her family, friends, and community are complex. Her life is this game of chess that she’s been playing from the very beginning, challenging the colonized world that she lives in, in a world that’s typecast her.
And here’s one many of us may already be familiar with: Muppet Christmas Carol. I think what’s timeless about the Muppets is that whoever you are, wherever you’re coming from, you see yourself in these misfits and odd creatures. There’s something for everyone in this story. I also think that whatever your traditions are that time of the year—some may be really familiar with this story or not at all—that at its heart it's a story about reflecting on your life, about valuing the gift of life and the people you share life with. It's also the Muppets so it's zany, fun, all while tugging on your heartstrings.
Last but not least: Raga Kids. This concert is going to give you the opportunity to experience the awesomeness of raga music. You get to see and hear Indian classical instruments accompanied by multilingual tunes and singalongs. I was first introduced to Brooklyn Raga Massive by way of a puppet show, actually. I was so entranced by the musicians I forgot about the puppets. They’re a collective, configuring themselves based on the performance or the community they’re engaging. They educate, but in a very performative and artistic way—you’re walking out not only with a really full, unique music experience, but with a deeper appreciation for raga music and Indian music.
Thanks Steven. We’re looking forward to it. I am, too!
Beginning October 31, the dancers of Grupo de Rua make their BAM debut at the Howard Gilman Opera House with their gravity-defying work Inoah. The group hails from Rio de Janeiro and was co-founded by Bessie Award-winner Bruno Beltrão, who the The Guardian (UK) calls “one of the most intelligently creative choreographers.” He, along with the 10 male dancers of his company, spent six months together in the countryside outside Rio de Janeiro developing the stunning choreography of Inoah. The result is a visceral display of tension and release that expresses a unique, contemporary Brazilian perspective. The experience doesn’t have to begin and end with the performance, however. Here’s how to celebrate Brazilian culture all week long right here in NYC.
9am: Start your morning off with an Intro & Conditioning Class at the New York Mindful Capoeira Center, a Lower East Side landmark that specializes in the Afro-Brazilian traditional martial arts. By combining elements of dance and mindful rhythmic movement, capoeira is a workout for both the mind and the body.
11am: After you’ve worked up a serious appetite from capoeira class, be sure to head to Cafe Patoro for a Pão de Queijo. These small cheese rolls are a delicious breakfast staple, particularly in Southeast Brazil, and are Cafe Patoro’s specialty. Other menu highlights include the Brigadeiro Croissant (a Brazilian bon-bon with chocolate filling and sprinkles) and the Brigadeiro Latte (also covered in sprinkles). Don’t have much of a sweet tooth? Check out the empanadas for a more savory brunch option.
1pm: You’ll find the New York outpost of Galeria Nara Roesler, one of Brazil’s foremost contemporary art galleries, tucked away in the Upper East Side gallery circuit. Currently on exhibit is Tumulto, Turbilhão [Tumult, Turmoil], artworks by Lucia Koch that comment on order, or the lack thereof. If there’s time, take a stroll along W. 46th St. between Fifth and Sixth Avenues to experience a block known as “Little Brazil.”
3pm: Committed to preserving Brazil’s rich architectural traditions, ESPASSO showcases modern and contemporary Brazilian furniture. The group’s Tribeca showroom is stunning, displaying Brazilian design greats like Branco and Preto alongside more contemporary artists like Rodrigo Ohtake. Though any ESPASSO piece will run you a pretty penny, the store is worth stopping by for the experience alone.
5pm: Nestled on busy Richardson Street in Williamsburg, Beco opened its doors in 2009 and is heavily inspired by the “botecos of São Paulo: local neighborhood bars known for friendly atmosphere, lively music, and light fare.” You could start your meal with more Pão de Queijo (because it’s impossible to have just one), or switch it up with some Coxinhas, traditional Brazilian croquettes. Feeling extra hungry? Try out their Feijoada, Brazil’s national dish. With locally smoked pork meat, black bean stew, rice, collard greens, salsa, and farofa, your taste buds will thank you.
6:30pm: After dinner, head around the corner to Miss Favela for a few pre-show cocktails. Despite the cold outside, the bar and restaurant maintains a warm and uniquely Brazilian atmosphere where everyone feels like family. Be sure to order a Caipirinha, the house special and Brazil’s national cocktail. Made with cachaça (a distilled alcohol from fermented sugarcane juice), sugar, and lime, a Caipirinha will definitely make you forget that we still have a few months of winter left in New York.
7:30pm: Spend the evening at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House with the 10 male dancers of Grupo de Rua for +! Brazil’s leading contemporary dance troupe. (Learn more and get tickets here.)
10pm: If you’re inspired to get moving after seeing Inoah, head to Bembe, a Brooklyn staple that hosts some of the borough’s best dance parties. Bringing the best in global music to New York, it’s impossible not to feel the energy as soon as you step inside. DJs like David Medina spins the best in salsa, kompa, bachata, cumbia, sambra, and Afro-house while live percussionists keep you moving till late at night—just like a true Brazilian.
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