BAM blog

Inoah , a gravity-defying work from the mind of Brazilian choreographer Bruno Beltrão, comes to the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House Oct 31—Nov 2. His company, Grupo de Rua, was founded in Niteroi, a municipality of the bustling state of Rio de Janeiro. With a mix of street style, athletic hip-hop, and weightless physicality, they express the energy of this region in a 50-minute, heart-stopping experiment. Before immersing yourself in this intoxicating, urban work, prep your mind and soul with the sounds of Rio de Janeiro!

The RIOPOP playlist created by Brazilian-American A&R/Producer Béco Dranoff is an overview of artists, rhythms and iconic songs directly associated with Rio's rich musical heritage. The playlist includes modern and classic MPB (Música popular brasileira) stars such as Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso (not Rio natives, but very much associated with the city), Martinho da Vila, Beth Carvalho, Jorge Ben Jor, Bezerra da Silva and Tim Maia, as well as Marisa Monte, Marina Lima, Lulu Santos, Seu Jorge plus today's Pop stars such as IZA, Anitta, Nego Do Borel, Ludmilla and more. Enjoy a kaleidoscopic sound trip into Samba, Funk Carioca, MPB, Soul, Disco, Hip Hop, Rock and Pop.

Béco Dranoff produces 'Brazilab', the monthly Brazilian radio program online for Spain's acclaimed Radio Gladys Palmera.

Inoah will be at BAM Oct 31—Nov 2.

By Jess Barbagallo

Dimitris Papaioannou—creator of The Great Tamer and other works of virtuosic dance-theater spectacle since 1986— employs nudity in his live performances. Among other things. His stagecraft, in the lineage of Pina Bausch and Robert Wilson, could be described as anthropomorphic; he treats his sets like bodies too. Ideal in their beauty and mutant in their potential, his floors are always gamely ready to be stripped. They keep coming undone, erupting in raised anomalies designed to unmoor his dancers. I don’t normally conceive of stages as flesh, yet all metaphors point in this direction.

The last vivid memory I have of a nude body onstage was at a bastardized rendition of Antigone hosted by well-known dance theater/performance artist Ann Liv Young in her Bushwick apartment. I entered the residence with my companion and a hip docent instructed us that the performance would not begin for forty-five minutes, so we headed toward the roof to look at the setting sun. Passing a room to our left, I saw Young naked from the waist up, holding a dog to her breasts. Nearly beatific in her Mona Lisa repose atop the poverty of an uneven cardboard floor, the performer has often been witnessed naked in her shows, embellished by variously colored wigs, mud, glitter, and face paint. In the frequency of her nudity she has stripped the undressed state of its shock value. On the roof of her building, a male critic glibly wondered after the necessity of her repeat antics—“didn’t Karen Finley already do this?”—inciting a gentle argument that continued back down the stairs.

To presume that one naked body is every naked body is the very height of a cool conceit. To risk individuating undressed bodies is to reveal how idiosyncratic desire actually is.

In Papaioannou’s six-hour durational work Inside (2011), set inside a room set inside a theater in Athens, there are many nudes of more opaque personality than Young’s, figures simultaneously alone but together in their aloneness; they make their way through personal scores that accumulate in collisions of mysterious togetherness. The installation’s choreography is described as “a simple series of actions, of humans returning home.” These actions are familiar and banal: a woman pulls a clean white sheet over her naked body. A shirtless man approaches a window and looks “outside.” As I watch video documentation of the work, sedentary in my bed, I marvel at these specimens. Trapezius muscles falling down backs make me want to run to a gym so that, over time, I may watch my own body change in front of the mirror.

Or, if one dictum of spectatorship is mirroring:

I may walk in plain patterns over my floor.

I may climb into bed with another naked body.

I may better sense the spectral traces that live in my architectures.

Like a hotel room in a suburb of Paris where I suffer a week-long flu while performing a production of Endgame at a nearby theater. My costume is just linen yoga pants, transparent enough to expose my boxer briefs and occasional flashes of pubic hair, as I prostrate myself on white marley before my scene partner. I am shirtless in this production, my chest bearing the marks of a relatively recent top surgery. The director Tania Bruguera has said of my pale body, mottled by cystic acne and the patchiest beard: “You are like a sculpture.” Inside Beckett’s cryptic text, I enjoy this sense of self that vacillates between animal and artwork, and it is theatrical complex as container which allows me this weirdly pleasurable limbo state of freedom, even as I am ostensibly trapped in our panopticon set. At night, sick and tender, I hobble to the toilet, delivering a performance of self-management that perhaps has been delivered here before.

As this story might illustrate, frame is sacred as a tool for organizing the chaos that a body in motion, albeit slowed and humble, might produce. In Papaioannou’s Primal Matter (2015), a duet between the choreographer and a single performer, a board or a table—the simplest tools of home— become the custom-fit canvas for the dancer under Pappaiannou’s hands. The objectified figure looks on as he is manipulated. His face says: Sometimes it is tedious to be a muse. Sometimes I do not know what is coming. To be attended to in this way … it is not necessarily to be understood. But perhaps the problem is not a lack of understanding between the performers, or between the artist and subject, or between the picture onstage and the public outside. Perhaps the problem is a surplus of the desire to know, or to achieve a result through the initiation of an intimacy.

In the space between public and private—the space where my abject self lives, between hotel bathroom and a hundred spectators—Papaioannou posits the proscenium itself as a mediating ritual of relief, in the temporary nature of its offering. There is respite to be found in the glow of his theater, where the imagination becomes material and concrete: it’s a magic trick for spending time with your own body, which might seem to speak a language you do not know. For me, Papaioannou’s stage compositions precipitate a boomeranging voyeurism, where I begin to feel as though it is my body being watched by me, and not the other way around.

I was once asked to wrestle in the nude for another live performance. Pre-Endgame. It was an adaptation of Plato’s Republic. I declined, only to find myself in the piece’s final incarnation wearing a binder and Spanx for approximately eight minutes in a questionably choreographed sequence under a roaring pre-recorded voiceover of a Socratic dialogue. I thought the silhouette of nudity would be less humiliating than the reality of my unadorned body splayed in all directions: my genitals, my belly, the breasts I no longer have. I was wrong.

The Great Tamer will be at BAM Oct 15—20.

Jess Barbagallo is an arts writer, teacher, actor, and playwright based in New York City. His plays have been seen at Dixon Place and New Museum; his writing in Artforum; he has toured with Big Dance Theater and Builders Association; and appeared in Harry Potter on Broadway, among other citations.

The Great Tamer photos: Julian Mommert

Photo by Tommy Ga Ken Wan

By Violaine Huisman

Édouard Louis was sitting very straight, looking deliberately into the interviewer’s eyes. I was sitting next to him, on the other side of a two-tone couch—part grey, part red. We were on the set of La Grande Librairie, a talk show about books, broadcast live in hundreds of thousands of French homes weekly.

The show had brought together five writers with books loosely about family. The other three authors were across a coffee table from Édouard and me, flanking the presenter, in a club chair. The seating arrangement forced us to lean in each time it was our turn to speak. There was a live audience, too, though it wasn’t the participatory kind. (If you’re tempted to watch, the show is available on YouTube, in French.)

The interview focused on Édouard Louis’ latest publication, Who Killed My Father, a scathing attack on the French state’s neglect of the poor and contempt of the working class. In a prose both passionate and clinical, he writes: “You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death.”

Édouard Louis’ birth name is that of the protagonist of his first novel: Eddy Bellegueule. Like most anglophone names in France, often borrowed from American pop culture, Eddy sounds déclassé; Bellegueule literally means “pretty face.” In fact, Édouard Louis is very good looking: fine features, a slender gait, piercing blue eyes. The name Édouard is as posh in French as it is in English. The End of Eddy, about growing up poor and queer in a depressed rural town, overwhelmingly racist and homophobic, tells the story of the abuse he suffered as a child and his escape from his soul-crushing milieu. His journey started with acting, with theater and more broadly with literature as a portal to reinvention. Eddy went on to attend the most prestigious schools in France, to join the cultural elite; he went from role-playing to becoming Édouard.

Édouard explained to the interviewer that in Who Killed My Father, he wanted to describe the impact of politics in a tangible way, through his father’s story. A former factory worker, his father was forced to return to work as a street cleaner after his health collapsed. In this vitriolic, pamphlet-like volume, Édouard Louis blames the state for instituting an inhumane political system, unjust and blind to workers’ physical suffering. He blames French politicians—calling them out by name—for destroying his father’s body. He also comes to his father’s defense, after having decried in stark, uncompromising language, how ashamed and resentful he was of his upbringing in The End of Eddy.

The TV presenter, alternately reading from his teleprompter and going off script, raised an obvious contradiction: How is it to write about the working class when you have become a bourgeois yourself? Well, it’s complicated, said Édouard, more or less. He invoked Jean-Paul Sartre: In The Words, the philosopher writes about the impossibility of speaking on behalf of the voiceless, and the moral obligation to have their voice be heard. We understand you’ve read Sartre, said the TV presenter, but I’m asking you to speak from the heart. How do you, Édouard Louis, feel, deep down, about this inner conflict? Well, said Édouard, politely, deep down, I feel the books I’ve read help me make sense of questions I find no simple answers to.

As the words hung in the air, I turned to the audience, noticing a woman I knew. We exchanged smiles. A camera mounted on tracks moved past us.

Becoming Édouard, for Eddy, has meant contending with different versions of himself: whether it is the tortured child he once was, the public figure he now is, or the stage adaptation of his character. It takes courage and audacity to tells one’s story. It takes generosity to let others own it, too.

The End of Eddy will be at BAM Nov 14—21.

Violaine Huisman is a writer, translator, and independent curator based in Brooklyn. She is the co-founder of The Floor, a space which merges wellness with arts and civic engagement.

Maira Kalman, Marie-Laure de Noailles in Her Paris Salon, 2019, courtesy of the artist and Julie Saul Projects

By Loney Abrams

Illustrator, author, and beloved BAM artist Maira Kalman generously partnered with Julie Saul Projects and BAM to release a new edition to benefit BAM’s artistic and educational programs; it’s available online through Artspace. Signed and numbered by the artist, the print was produced in an edition size of 75. Artspace’s Loney Abrams sat down with Maira Kalman to discuss Kalman’s most fascinating multi-disciplinary projects, where she finds inspiration, and her newest BAM benefit edition. Condensed highlights from their conversation are shared below.

Loney Abrams: You installed a reproduction of your mother’s closet inside the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. You also published a book, Sara Berman’s Closest, which illustrated the life of your mother. What was this project all about?

Maira Kalman:My mother was a luminous presence in our lives, and we always admired her. One of the things she did, among many things, was keep a closet of all-white clothing, completely pristine. She probably started doing that when she got divorced from my father. (But we're from Israel and a lot of people there wear all white, so it's not that unusual.) Her closet was a thing of art and a thing of beauty. So once she died and we were standing in her closet, I thought, this should be kept as a museum. That wasn't practical, so we saved everything.

Ten years later, my son, Alex Kalman, opened a museum called Mmuseumm in an abandoned freight elevator shaft on Cortlandt Alley. (Later, he obtained a little annex.) He and I installed “Sarah Berman's Closet.” It seemed like the right time and the right place, with the counterpoint of a pristine white thing in the middle of this grungy, derelict alley. And then it went, as all things do, to the Met after that. Amelia Peck, who is the curator of the American Wing, came to see it and thought it would make an incredible installation in juxtaposition to the most elaborate closet, from 100 years earlier, that belonged to Arabella Worsham, who was very wealthy. So it was at The Met for nine months, and now it's traveling. In the meantime, Alex and I did a collaboration on the book Sara Berman's Closet. How do you tell the story of somebody's life who’s not famous, who didn't do anything exceptional, but who is an exceptional person, and influenced us greatly? This sense of beauty and order, of editing your life—what does it really mean to know what you have?

LA: How common is it that your illustration projects cross over into installation or three-dimensional space, and vice versa?

MK: All the time. I think that I probably have a nice ability to think without too many constraints. So when I was working on illustrating The Elements of Style, for instance, I started singing the text. “Would, Could, Should.” And I thought, this would make a fantastic opera. Fortunately, I knew an amazing composer, Nico Muhly, and we were able to mount the opera at the New York Public Library. So to me, that's the nature of my day. Connections are made in unexpected ways. It comes very naturally, and I don't dismiss any ideas. I certainly have thought of stupid ideas! But sometimes they're not.

LA: How did The Elements of Style project come about?

MK: I found the book in a summer yard sale and I started reading it. I thought the book was spectacularly funny and interesting and cinematic. It's also digressive in the way that I think: I like jumping from one thing to another and I don't like plot. So, this was a perfect project for me.

LA: Do you often find inspiration at yard sales? Or where do you typically look for source material?

MK: There isn't anything that isn't inspiring, basically, from taking a walk to traveling to exotic places, to reading, music, movies, watching people, fashion... There's no end to being curious about stuff. Estate sales are fun because you can rummage through what other people discard, and say, do I need this? At this point in my life, I'm much more selective and I'm not trying to acquire so much as I'm trying to deaccession.

LA: What can you tell me about the edition you produced to benefit BAM?

MK: I usually make works for an assignment, which is how I like to relate to things. I like the constraint of an assignment, though some of them transcend the assignment. The edition came from a painting I did for an illustration edition of the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. I did about 60-plus paintings for this book, which is going to come out in March. This image just felt like the right painting, which now has a second life.

LA: Can you talk a little bit about what's happening in that scene? How does it relate to the book?

MK: That scene really has everything. It's of Marie-Laure de Noailles in her salon, which is how many people met one another during that time in Paris. There's somebody playing music; she's holding a dog; and there’s this phenomenal amount of beauty around them—and that's part of their landscape, part of their Sunday afternoon. Salons allowed people to gather in your home to create tremendous amounts of beauty and interest and conversation. I'm drawn to that world: the chance encounters and the sense of domesticity. And Gertrude and Alice had that very much, of course. They had a salon and people would come to their house—Matisse, Stravinsky, Cocteau, Man Ray, everybody! This is where ideas cross pollinated, and it was a source of inspiration. Of course, there were also probably rivalries and love affairs and things like that.... So, I really like the salon. I like interiors. I like sofas. I like music. I like dogs.

LA: What's striking to me about that image is that it does pull you into this inviting space, this feeling of leisurely appreciation for music and culture, and this domestic exchange of ideas that you talk about. But then, there’s a dog and a woman looking directly at you, the viewer, and there’s something startling about that. You’re pulled into the scene, but also reminded of your relationship to it as someone on the outside looking in. And the subjects seem very self-aware, somehow.

MK: Right. She seems to have a lot of self-confidence. This image was based on a photograph. She's looking dead straight at the photographer, and she’s posing in a kind of a vogue-ish way. So there’s that feeling that you're in control, but maybe you're vulnerable also, and you're willing to experiment and embark on an aesthetic experience. So all of those things are going on in that room—which is the nature of anybody's work. You're always experimenting, and then hopefully you have a cozy bed to go to at night.

Visit Artspace to purchase Marie-Laure de Noailles in Her Paris Salon, or contact Alli Arnold at aarnold@BAM.org with any questions.

Loney Abrams is the Editor-in-Chief of Artspace, and is an artist, writer, and curator living in Brooklyn.

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 Jane Campion’s In the Cut (2003) with Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971).

By Caden Mark Gardner

At the 70th Cannes Film Festival in 2017, directors of past Palme d’Or winners were invited back to celebrate the Festival’s history. At the center of one photo for this occasion was Jane Campion surrounded by an overwhelmingly male swath of contemporaries—a damning visual of the festival’s historic gender inequality. Sharing the top prize for The Piano in 1993 with Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine), Campion remains the only female director to win the award. The Piano went on to achieve world cinema renown, winning three Oscars, and reaping $140 million in global box office. That type of success is seldom replicated. Since The Piano, Campion’s works have been predominantly female-focused and specifically concerned with portraying femininity in relation to toxic masculinity and patriarchy, an impulse most recently realized in her limited run series Top of the Lake (2013—17).

None of Campion’s post-Piano works, however, have been as polarizing as her dark and disturbing adaptation of Susanna Moore’s bestselling novel, In the Cut (2003). The film stars Meg Ryan as Frannie Avery, a college English professor who becomes dangerously entangled with a detective investigating a series of murders in her Manhattan neighborhood. Moore’s novel, first published in 1995, emerged at a time when erotic thriller films were produced and consumed at rapid volume—think Basic Instinct, Body of Evidence, and Disclosure. But Campion chose to set her adaptation in a contemporary, post-9/11 NYC, and in the process offered a critique of that once-prolific genre. It is a “revisionist erotic thriller,” much in the tradition of the grittier 70s Westerns that offered stark spins on their earlier, more gung-ho cousins.

Meg Ryan and Jennifer Jason Leigh in In the Cut (2003)

In the Cut was largely met with critical revulsion, despite the intriguing, heavily promoted appeal of an against-type Meg Ryan subverting her “good girl” persona. A (mostly male) critical body seemed disappointed in the film’s insistence on notes of reflexivity and ambiguity within and alongside moments of female pleasure. The snarky tenor of some negative reviews—“So we have to watch Ryan, author of the most famous fake orgasm in cinema history groaning and moaning once again,” sneered The Guardian—suggested that many critics were simply not ready to engage in good faith with a female director explicitly probing the subject of female pleasure and unabashedly investigating the effects of being desired upon a woman’s psyche.

As opposed to the critical vitriol In the Cut received, Alan J. Pakula’s Klute was met with instant recognition, going on to win Jane Fonda her first Oscar for her leading role as sex worker Bree Daniels. Like Ryan’s Frannie, Bree becomes involved both professionally and intimately with a detective (Donald Sutherland) who is investigating the serial murders of sex workers. Fonda’s Bree is equal parts jaded and vulnerable, aware of how she is perceived as a sex worker while also feeling caught, unable to stop turning tricks despite the numbing effect of the work. As an alternative, she tries to get work as a model and actress, but the oppressive male gaze cannot be escaped. In one scene Bree is shown sitting in a long line of equally beautiful models positioned as objects of desire for the men in charge who loom over the seated, silent women.

Jane Fonda in Klute (1971)

In contrast to Bree’s life as a sex worker, In the Cut’s Frannie is a college professor, a supposedly maternal and nurturing occupation, but she is nevertheless a sexual being and an object of desire. Whatever Bree and Frannie do, there is an undercurrent of voyeurism and judgment. Obsession and desire in the crosshairs of the male gaze and a pervasive feeling of unease permeates both films as the female characters are hunted by an unknown killer.

In Klute, the authorities only become concerned with the murders of sex workers when the murders are connected to the disappearance of a rich businessman. In the world of the film it is an accepted banality that women simply vanish, resurfacing as dead bodies. In In the Cut Campion reveals society’s deeper disregard for the female body by having Frannie discover a limb in her garden; women are not even left as corpses, merely disembodied parts.

While Klute has reached an expansive audience, In the Cut warrants another look from moviegoers. It functions as a fascinating and arguably necessary corrective to the erotic thriller genre. Once seen, it grabs hold of you and proves difficult to shake off.

Join us for Beyond the Canon on Sun, Nov 24 at 2pm.

Caden Mark Gardner is a freelance film critic and writer from Schenectady, New York. His bylines include MUBI Notebook, Reverse Shot, and Los Angeles Review of Books.

In the Cut courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics/Photofest
Klute courtesy of Warner Bros./Photofest
© 2019 Brooklyn Academy of Music, Inc. All rights reserved.

Photo courtesy of Grasshopper Film

By Lindsay Brayton

Brett Story is an award-winning filmmaker and writer based in Toronto. The Hottest August is her third documentary feature and screens exclusively at BAM Nov 15—27.

Lindsay Brayton: How do you feel about the future?

Brett Story: I feel fearful, but energized. Fearful is not the same as hopeless. Hopelessness seems to me more about feeling vacated of any energy, any will or desire to build anything better. And I have lots of energy and lots of will and desire, and I’m energized by the people I see fighting for a better world. But I also worry very much—not just about what kinds of destruction we as a human species, organized into hierarchies of power incentivized to exploit the earth’s resources as much as possible—are wreaking upon the earth, but about how we will treat each other as our fears grow. We have to decide that we fight for each other.

LB: How did The Hottest August come about?

BS: I think I’ve been reflecting a lot myself on the question of the future, and on how my own experience feels very different than that of older generations who, because things felt possible and open, made things and enacted ambitious ideas. I wanted a cinematic means of figuring out what was collective about my personal experience, what was political about it. And I’ve always been interested in the “encounter” as a cinematic method; the way strangers and places are characters in our own lives, and therefore might count as central characters in our films.

Photo courtesy of Grasshopper Film

LB: You’re Toronto based. Why did you decide to make this film in Brooklyn? Do you find that New Yorkers have a perspective on the future that is different from Canadians? Do Canadians and Americans worry about different things concerning the future?

BS: The short answer is that I was living in Brooklyn when I made this film, and I wanted to make a film about where I am, and where others are, when we share space. But I also think New York generally is paradigmatic of many of the themes of the film—rising inequality, spatial segregation, organized racism, and the experience of being at once at a remove, and also all too close, to the immediacies of the climate crisis. I don’t think Canadians and Americans worry about different things, no, but I think they might tell themselves slightly different stories about who or what is responsible for their troubles and what the role of government should be. And of course, sometimes the stories we tell ourselves are the same. As the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) said recently, we all live in same country after all, and that country is capitalism.

LB: You’ve also programmed a short repertory series called In This Climate. How did you decide on the four films in the series?

BS:The Hottest August certainly emerged in part out of my own frustration with a lot of “climate change films,” which I find myself almost never wanting to watch. I’m not a disengaged person —quite the opposite—and so I have been reflecting on what it is that can feel so stale about a lot of these films (though of course not all of them!). And for me, they often feel disconnected from other urgent questions, like who has power in society and what do we do with our fears when we ourselves don’t feel like we have power. I wanted to program a series that treats both “climate” and “crisis” as expansively, and historically, as I think the climate crisis deserves to be treated. And so I chose a diverse set of films that hopefully brings out some of the connections between colonialism, immigration policy, collective melancholy, the global arms trade, and resource extraction and ecological catastrophe.

Photo courtesy of Grasshopper Film

LB: Can you give me two sentences on why people shouldn’t miss the films in the In This Climate series?

BS: People should come see these films because they will make you think and feel and want to spend time talking them out with friends afterwards. These are some of the most beautifully rendered and thought provoking films I’ve ever seen and they will lodge themselves in your psyches for weeks if not months afterwards.

LB: I was re-reading Manohla Dargis’ New York Times review of Children of Men from 2006; she writes, “we Americans are in an apocalyptic frame of mind.” Here we are 13 years later and I’d say the frame of mind is still apocalyptic. Is there something different or unique about despair in 2019 concerning the future, or is this feeling evergreen?

BS: It was interesting re-watching Children of Men for this series because I realized that it’s begun to feel less identifiable as a work of speculative fiction. I almost couldn’t tell if it even “works” in the same way as it did when I first watched it, because there’s almost too much resonance with the present. The future, it seems, is now. I think the despair we feel is almost less about the future as it is about the present, and the apocalyptic frame of mind is also an apocalyptic frame of present politics. Which is to say, I think we have to fight nihilism wherever we see it, including in the policies of politicians and CEOs hell bent on amassing as much wealth as possible while burning the whole world to the ground.

The Hottest August screens exclusively at BAM Nov 15—27.

Lindsay Brayton is the BAM Film Marketing and Publicity Assistant

Photo: Marc Brenner

By Matthew Allen

One of the bastions of unfiltered African-American discourse—the barber shop—is the setting for a Next Wave show. When contemplating where a Black man can have a safe space to express his feelings and engage in unbridled debate and dialogue, a business where one gets haircuts may be the last place that comes to mind, but it’s true. Making its New York debut on December 3 at the Harvey Theater at BAM Strong, Barber Shop Chronicles (Fuel/National Theatre/Leeds Playhouse) finds six cities throughout the African Diaspora united by two commonalities—getting a fresh trim and speaking your mind.

Stemming from slavery and running all the way to the age of Trump, the Black American male has scarcely had a place or platform where he could fearlessly express his thoughts and observations. The origin of the barber is traced to Ancient Egypt, as far back as 5000 BC. While the foundation of the “business” derives from Africa, barber shop “culture” is strong throughout the African diaspora. In the 20th century, aside from his home and the church, the barber shop was traditionally all he had to call his own—the only place untainted by the dreaded white gaze. To understand the importance of the barber shop, observe such evidence in over 50 years of pop culture.

Photo: Marc Brenner

First and foremost is the obvious—the desire to look good. From Afros and dark caesars, to high-top fades and faux-hawks, grooming can be paramount to the Black man, whether to look presentable for an interview, or impress a date. But you might have to wait, as not every head is fit for every cutter, so when you find the right barber, you’ll wait no matter what—whether there are three people ahead or two vacant barbers with nothing to do.

In a 2018 episode of FX’s Emmy-winning comedy Atlanta, we bust a gut watching Paper Boi falling folly after ridiculous folly with his barber, Bibby, all to get his hair cut in exactly the way he wants and needs it. It’s hilarious, but it also speaks to an underlying theme that comes with your barber: trust. Reliability is paramount—knowing what you’re going to get, which can sometimes only attributed to negative things, like police harassment, for one.

Photo: Marc Brenner

Honest discourse is the key to fostering healthy communication and solutions to social ills. For Black American males, the barber shop has been a forum for examining race relations and interaction between the sexes. You’ll see this in Wattstax (1973), for instance. The documentary on the titular music festival commemorating the 1967 Watts Riots in LA not only featured performances from Isaac Hayes, Allen King, and The Bar-Kays, but also commentary from Watts natives. It’s no accident that many Black citizens were interviewed in local barber shops and beauty salons—safe spaces—speaking unwaveringly on topics like the relations between Black men and Black women, and the pitfalls of being called a nigger at school for the first time.

Debates in barber shops have arguably become a part of Black American folklore. The raucous energy and unapologetic opinions—ranging from the best rappers, ball players, and political antics—are welcome and encouraged. Take Showtime’s The Shop (2019), for example. Executive-produced by NBA superstar LeBron James, the program finds athletes, musicians, and entertainers expounding on topics of the day, with hot takes flying about. Comedian Jerrod Carmichael spoke candidly about his disdain for Broadway musical Hamilton, an otherwise celebrated multi-cultural phenomenon. Or John Landis’ Coming to America (1988) starring Eddie Murphy, which featured hysterically iconic barber shop disagreements about boxers.

Finally, there’s ownership. In the 1800s, the first Black barbers, both free and unfree, almost exclusively served wealthy whites. Following emancipation, the establishments soon became sacred institutions for African-Americans and opportunities for Black men to become proprietors of their own businesses. Being a master of your own fate is a luxury for most men, but for Black men, it’s especially not to be taken for granted. It’s fitting that James used The Shop as the place where California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill allowing college athletes to benefit financially when universities use their likeness, name, and image. This will do what many barber shops do all over the world: empower Black men.

Matthew Allen is a Brooklyn-based TV producer and music journalist whose work can be found in Ebony, Jet, The Root, Village Voice, BRIC Community Media, and PBS’ All Arts.

Barber Shop Chronicles will be at BAM Dec 3—8.

Set in barber shops across five cities on the African content (Lagos, Johannesburg, Accra, Kampala, Harare) and in a major city in its diaspora (London), Barber Shop Chronicles (Dec 3—8 at the Harvey Theater at BAM Strong) explores unfiltered stories about identity, displacement, and black masculinity. Within this rich tapestry of storytelling woven by playwright, poet, and spoken word artist Inua Ellas, is the popular music from the African continent; as the show pivots from city to city, the music—sometimes coming out of a speaker and other times produced by the actors on stage—reorients and guides us from shop to shop, and serves as a joyful and buoyant force in the production.

Just as the men in the six radically different cities are all united by the familiar barber shop, they also all unite to dance, regardless of location. The music they move to is Afrobeats, a contemporary pop sound developed in Nigeria and Ghana in the early 2000s, gaining prominence in the last decade with acceptance by major western artists and record labels. With the massive cultural diversity on the African continent and its diaspora, Afrobeats has several subgenres like azonto (Ghana), gqom (South Africa), and banku music (Ghana and Nigeria), as well as fusion genres like Afrosoca (Caribbean) and AfroWave (UK). Afrobeats has become a sonic bridge linking countries on the continent and people of African descent across oceans, as aspects of African culture have gone mainstream (think Black Panther and a growing interest among Africans in the diaspora keen to retrace their roots to the continent).

To accompany Barber Shop Chronicles, we have created an Afrobeats playlist that exemplifies this growing unification of people of African descent: Each song features collaborations by Black artists from different countries fusing subgenres, languages, and cultures. This was the concept behind Beyoncé’s most recent album The Gift (soundtrack to the new Lion King movie), which includes 20 artists from the United States, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, and Cameroon. Also included in this playlist are a few songs of fusion genres like the international hit “Drogba (Joanna)” by Afro B (AfroWave) and Timaya’s “Sanko” (AfroSoca). Enjoy hip hop, dancehall, grime, soca and electro-pop, all with an Afrobeats pulse.

Barber Shop Chronicles will be at BAM Dec 3—8, as part of Next Wave 2019, a season of artists making their BAM debuts.

Akornefa Akyea is the content marketing coordinator at BAM and is a former producer atAfropop Worldwide.

Interviews by Akornefa Akyea
Photographs by Sam Polcer

Written by Nigerian-British poet and playwright Inua Ellams, international sensation Barber Shop Chronicles , which comes to BAM Dec 3—8 for its US premiere—is set in cities across the African continent (Lagos, Johannesburg, Accra, Kampala, and Harare) and London, and conjures the sacred space where men—in this case Black men—come together not only for a good trim, but for necessary and unfiltered discussion on black masculinity, immigration, identity and more.

While the services provided at barber shops around the world are similar, each shop has its own unique atmosphere and distinct character. We visited four shops on Fulton St., home also to the Harvey Theater at BAM Strong, where the play will be performed, to find out how they foster a sense of community.

Respect for Life Barber Shop: Positive Thinking
Claim to fame: was Biggie Smalls’ preferred barber shop

“I deal with the law of attraction. I try to always give positive energy and keep a positive head, because my energy definitely goes into people whose heads I’m touching. A guy came in the other day complaining about his job. I told him he shouldn’t do that anymore because there are people sitting here right now without jobs. You have a job! You gotta find the positive thing in that job that makes you go to work and make the best of that situation. No matter where you work, you chose to work there. Because everything that happens to you is what you’ve allowed or made happen. Thoughts become things. Words are powerful. That’s how I live, through the law of attraction. We see hundreds of people that come through here and everybody’s going through all their different situations, so you have to stay in a positive mind.” —Reggie, barber, 52

3 Suns Barbershop: Art

Added attraction: boasts a tattoo parlor within

“I was going to FIT for book illustration. That’s what I really wanted to do. I kind of always had this craft in my back pocket. It just ended up that I got into barbering and fell in love with it. Drawing, painting, sculpting, eye-hand coordination: I’m using all the same creative skills. If you look around the shop, you’ll notice that there are a lot of paintings on the wall. I got a painting in the back that’s mine. I used to have just my paintings but other artists used to come in and ask who the artist is and if they could show their work. It started to become like a rotation, just representing artists in the neighborhood. I do it every two months—rotating the walls for local artists. It’s decor, it’s a good look and I like the different energy and feel of change and different art coming in. And each artist kind of just changes the whole feel of the shop. That’s what I really like.”—Rahkeem, barber/owner, 42

Levels Barbershop: Music

Proof they’re doing something right: there are seven branches across New York City

“We play music in here all the time! What it is, is we have songs that we’ve played too much that will cause a problem in here. So one song we cannot play in here—we don’t play in here—is ‘No Diggity.’ They have so many versions of ‘No Diggity’ it don’t make sense. They said they heard it too many times. If it comes on, everyone’s like, ‘Oh! What you doing?’ We don’t play ‘No Diggity!’”—Damian, barber, 39

The Stoop: Balance

It’s a family affair: owned by fun-loving twin brothers Quan and Tav

“People always leave here with a smile. I feel like people just embrace the fun and love that we give off because I think that we embrace it all. People come here and they just talk. Whether they’re whispering just to their barber or talking to everybody, they’re able to get it off their chest. Just like people go into the church and do their Hail Marys, they come in here and do their Hail Marys, but it’s judgement free in here.

“Since we’ve opened up the shop, I’ve never seen so many grown men cry out in public. Like literally bawling in here. And you know it isn’t a bad thing, because like I said sometimes you just need to get it out and then move forward.

“We do everything in here. We have game nights, we do Karaoke Fridays; we do Cutting Karaoke. The customer can pick a song and then we sing along. But none of us can really sing, we’re just doing it for fun. Don’t try to book us!”—Quan, barber/owner, 33

Barber Shop Chronicles will be at BAM Dec 3—8, as part of Next Wave 2019, a season of artists making their BAM debuts.

Note: BAM's new Artistic Director David Binder chose A Very Meow Meow Holiday Show to kick off an annual holiday block. Check out the seasonal photos after the jump from the BAM Hamm Archives.

Meow Meow. Photo: Magnus Hastings

By Sally Ollove
with contributions by John Jarboe

“What is cabaret?”

Thank you for asking! Cabaret is a musical by Kander and Ebb that once starred Liza Minnelli. It’s a kind of table. It’s a brand of cracker that 70s suburbanites served at key parties. It’s an indulgence, a secret, a cult, a radical experiment in community building, a trust exercise between performer and audience. An ephemeral queering of traditional performance modes. It’s an artform whose audience is living and getting younger.

Even as audiences get younger, the world around them seems to be collapsing. I used to think of cabaret as a place of beginnings, but more and more I see it as a place of endings or, really, of post-endings. Post-narrative, post-theatrical, post-pretension, post-perfection. At its most basic level, cabaret is a performer sitting metaphorically (or literally) in your lap sharing their virtuosity, vulnerability, and some laughs. Cabaret began on the site of the failed Paris Commune uprising and has a history of flourishing as people who don’t fit into the mainstream struggle: in post WWI Germany, in Harlem during the Renaissance, in Midtown during McCarthyism, and downtown post 9/11. As Brecht, a hanger-on of the Weimar cabaret scene, said: “In the dark times. Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” When everything else has fallen away, we’ll still be huddling around a piano with someone to help us laugh through tears and sing songs that touch us in deep and unknowable ways.

BAM holiday card featuring Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives.

When things feel like they are ending, entertainment tends to fall into two categories: art about how we ended up here, or art that provides escape. Cabaret is art about the hard times that feels like escapism, sometimes to a clear societal benefit. For example, cabaret star Justin Vivian Bond create space where audiences feel seen. Bond uses their quick wit, charm, vulnerability, and prodigious voice to find moments of connection, most recently as “Your Auntie Glam,” casting themselves in the role of the benevolent family member everyone in their audience wants, and some desperately need.

Classic BAM holiday card. Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives.

As cabaret artists, we like to imagine ourselves using our wit to take down injustice or spur others to action. But cabaret is a tool that isn’t always used for good. Sometimes, the taming of darkness allows it to propagate. Jewish composers of the Weimar era so effectively satirized anti-Semitism with songs like “The Jews are to Blame for Everything” that it became impossible to tell if audiences were laughing at Nazis or their victims. And, of course, as Kander & Ebb point out, in the end, cabaret didn’t save anyone. What it offers is a safe space to explore dangerous ideas: what happens to those ideas depends entirely on what you do with them when you leave. If cabaret invites darkness in, where is the light? That comes from the radical sense of belonging that cabaret performers cultivate. Cabaret is a mode of performance but it’s also a kind of space: albeit small, imperfect, wedged into the corner of a restaurant or basement, usually with a bar. This space engenders an intimate performance that forces the artist into the audience’s space and generates a sense of controlled permissiveness. The best cabaret performers can carry that intimacy with them whether in the backroom of a bar or on the Harvey stage.

A previous BAM holiday celebration: Judith Owen &
Harry Shearer's Christmas Without Tears, 2015.
Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives.

Have you ever wanted to experiment with joining a cult? Cabaret can scratch that itch. A big difference between the benign worship of a cabaret star and the more dangerous worship of a rising dictator is the lack of permanence. A night is easier to experiment with than your eternal soul. And also—who gets to take up space? Cabaret stages these days are dominated by womxn and queer performers.

Meow Meow (in A Very Meow Meow Holiday Show, Harvey Theater at BAM Strong, Dec 12—14) identifies not as a cabaret artist, but as a post post-modern diva. When she demands help from her audience—usually men—with the air of a put-upon hostess who is making do with slightly disappointing dinner guests, she unapologetically commands the room in a way women are rarely allowed. We are there to serve her and the show and in doing so, we become an ad hoc community. We talk through her, and then we talk to each other (heaven forbid: actually talking with strangers!). In the outside world where leaders are almost always male and straight, cabaret gives us a glimpse at other options. In the Third Reich, Goebbels was so aware of the disruptive power of the host that he banned the use of emcees late in the 1930s, perhaps sensing that people might unconsciously make associations between the little cabaret dictators (who were frequently women and/or Jewish) and the big one heading the government. He effectively killed cabaret without ever banning it outright—once the emcee was gone, so was the appeal.

At a time of year filled with attempts to find light in the darkness, and rife with opportunities to celebrate idols from Santa to Mariah, many contemporary artists like Meow Meow embrace the holiday show. You can see the appeal: spend a night with chosen family instead of your actual family. Whether seeking an escape from December drear or Yuletide cheer, you can find it in this show which both sends up and engages earnestly with the trappings of traditional holiday fare. Surrender your will to your hostess for the evening, sip a cocktail or two, maybe make a new friend. And most of all, enjoy it while it lasts.

Sally Ollove is a freelance dramaturg who splits her time between Seattle where she lives and Philadelphia, where she is the Associate Artistic Director of the Bearded Ladies Cabaret.

Photo: NayMarie

By Alexandra Biss

“The walls feel a little tight today,” remarked Alia Shawkat’s 62nd scene partner in The Second Woman.“Tell me about it,” she replies without missing a beat. This was about hour 17 of the 24 Alia (and I) spent in the Fishman Space of the BAM Fisher. For all but 15 minutes every two hours, Alia was in a small mesh room set with a table, chairs, stereo, and bar cart. While we could see in, she couldn’t really see out. The walls of her world were defined by the repetition of a short scene with different, mostly male-presenting non-actor scene partners. They have a drink, she asks for reassurance, she throws noodles at him, they dance, she asks him to leave. In between each scene, Alia would get down on her hands and knees to clean up the just-thrown noodles, and reset. Set and reset. Nearly 100 times. The walls of my world from 5pm Friday to 5pm Saturday—watching the world in the box—felt more than a little tight, until they suddenly expanded in new ways.

Music went from grating to potentially maddening to fine to kind of reassuring and pleasant. My mind focused on the monotony, then suddenly the surprises. My body screamed SLEEP, then crossed into another plane of invincible euphoria. I noticed small details I might not have noticed without the repetition, like Alia is a leftie (11:53am).

I went into this 24-hour experience with just one goal—stay awake and don’t miss a scene. I succeeded, with the help of water (turns out proper hydration helps maintain energy… who knew?!), taking notes on each scene, healthy snacks every couple of hours, close proximity (I sat front row center for most of the show), a couple of energy drinks, and sheer force of will. It’s hard to summarize and articulate the experience, which loops back in on itself in non-linear ways that bristles at any attempt at more straightforward analysis. Because I chose to experience the entire show as endurance sport, any criticism is inseparable from my acute awareness of my own physical and mental state.

Photo: NayMarie

“How are you?” Alia’s character asks early in the scene. “That question is so often said with insincerity,” noted Shawkat’s scene partner around 10:15pm. How are you?—I asked myself countless times throughout my 24-hour experience, often writing down my replies: Eyes starting to feel a bit tired (1am); feeling amped tired fake awake but ok-ish? (7:30am); Not even tired. Who needs sleep?! (12:30pm).

Alia, probably best known for her roles in Search Party and Arrested Development, showed practically no signs of fatigue, and even joked with one scene partner around 8:45am who remarked that he was “a little tired, a little nervous.” “I’m one of those things.”—she replied. We seemed to share a jolt when an interesting scene partner changed the vibe of the connected space. Her performance held my attention and curiosity for 24 hours because of her simultaneous commitment to strict repetition and improvisation. She was very present and nimble with each scene partner, and clearly felt a thrill with the risk inherent in taking on a stranger every 15 minutes. I was particularly interested in her use of physical comedy, which she used to diffuse tension, enhance playfulness, or disarm her scene partner. Her riffs on the noodle throwing (tucked into someone’s eyeglasses, thrown onto a lap, or up a guy’s sleeve) could have become gimmicky or tiresome, but instead served as an emotional focal point of the scene and subtle performance of intimacy or distance.

Photo: NayMarie

There were many notable nuances to the scenes—some lovely, some boring, some uncomfortable. The more scenes I watched, the more seemingly small things made themselves apparent as part of a larger whole. This is the 6th scene partner to not be able to find the door on the way out. When she asks for reassurance, the default response from most men is exasperation—even from a scene partner who seemed sweet, playful, or loving at first. Dancing carries so much weight or none at all. 20% of the scene partners declined the $50 offered at scene’s end (yes, I tallied).

I’m still a bit disoriented, a few days later. I’m a little envious of other audience members who expressed the rush of binge watching—that just one more feeling—when they only intended to stay for an hour or so. But to experience the entire arc? It was illuminating theater. Plus I feel like a champion.

Alexandra Biss is the director of board relations at BAM.

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Before the curtain falls on a truly remarkable year of heartwarming, surprising, shocking, breathtaking, hilarious, or otherwise unforgettable moments and milestones here at BAM, we asked our fellow staff members to take a look back and share some of their favorites. Were you here for any of these, or do you have your own? Share them with us, and please join or support us in making BAM a home for adventurous art, audiences, and ideas in 2020!

In no particular order:

1) Édouard Louis taking a bow with the cast on the opening night of The End of Eddy.

2) Watching audience members take the Joe Melillo Elevator to the balcony at the Harvey Theater at BAM Strong for the first time.

3) The incredible, heart-breaking duet between Rachel Poirier and Alexander Leonhartsberger in Teac Damsa's Swan Lake/Loch na hEala. (Photo: Stephanie Berger)

4) Madonna performing “Frozen” in front of an enormous video projection of her daughter Lourdes.

5) Rep. Hakeem Jeffries quoting Biggie Smalls when explaining his rise in Congress—“you never thought hip-hop would take it this far”—at the 33rd Annual Brooklyn Tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.

6) The spectrum of overheard audience reactions to Marlene Monteiro Freitas’ bafflingly sublime Bacchae: Prelude to a Purge. (Photo: Stephanie Berger)

7) A sold-out audience waiting till the end of the closing credits of Beau Travail to burst into applause on opening night of our Claire Denis retrospective.

8) The holiday decorations at the security entrance.

9) All things Barber Shop Chronicles. (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)

10) Reading hundreds of questions in Selina Thompson’s brilliant Race Cards, coming across one that resonated, and becoming a part of Next Wave history by submitting an answer.

11) A performer’s 20-foot free fall (which the audience didn’t actually get to see) from the top of the monolithic wall in Espæce.

12) Nick Kroll’s complicated love affair with “salt and vinny” chips.

13) The always-inspiring Malala Yousafzai telling a full opera house audience, much of it consisting of high schoolers from around the city, “If you don’t speak out, you have to live your whole life with that.” (Photo: Mike Benigno)

14) Betty Carter Park—formerly “BAM Park”—finally opening to the public.

15) Jason Alexander doing a musical number called “Bagel Boss” on the Opera House stage, complete with dancing bagels, fly rigging, and a cameo from Tracy Morgan as God, on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

16) Raja Feather Kelly’s dancers at the BAM Gala 2019.

17) Rwandans raising their flag at the end of DanceAfrica, 25 years after the Genocide.

18) Dozens of arrows flying through the air and covering the stage in The Great Tamer.

19) The live percussion by Jimmy Cobb (former drummer for Miles Davis!) accompanying the 1913 silent film Lime Kiln Club Field Day, which opened the series Garrett Bradley's America: A Journey Through Race and Time.

20) 24 hours of Alia Shawkat. (Photo: NayMarie)

21) The anthropomorphic carrot with a taste for human flesh at this year’s indoor BAMboo!

22) Awkwafina telling a sold-out BAMcinemaFest opening night crowd that she saw the 2007 critically-panned Lindsay Lohan film I Know Who Killed Me at BAM. Little did she know we were planning to show the film a month later as part of the We Can’t Even: Millenials on Film series.

23) BAM staff marching in the Brooklyn Pride parade. Brooklyn showed up!

24) Shoveling more than 1000 pounds of regenerative soil into the brand new Rudin Family Gallery for the inaugural exhibition by Glenn Kaino.

25) Our own Flower Tortilla performing at Everybooty.

26) James Blake's ethereal cover of Joni Mitchell's timeless “A Case of You” during his Solo Piano concert at the Harvey Theater.

27) Meeting Mogho Naba Baongo II, king of the Ouagadougou region in Burkina Faso, in preparation for DanceAfrica 2020.

28) The couple that got engaged after artist Christopher K. Ho invited the public to “step on his heart” in his Dear John installation in the Peter Jay Sharp Building lobby.

29) The extremely stylish crowd at the launch of Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem, part of our Unbound literary series.

30) The VR-inspired dance improv at Teknopolis. (Photo: Rebecca Greenfield)

31) The artist Ted Riederer installing Persistent Echoes, a vinyl record time capsule, in the wall of The Rudin Family Gallery.

32) Legendary director Charles Burnett's quiet modesty during the Q&A following a screening of his film To Sleep With Anger on the opening night of our series Black 90s: A Turning Point in American Cinema.

33) Meow Meow crowdsurfing.

34) An Opera House audience gasping in unison during Bence Vági's breathtaking Non Solus. (Photo: Max Gordon)

35) 75-year-old Nona Hendryx gettin’ low at the opening of the 25th R&B Festival at MetroTech.

36) StaceyAnn Chin reading her poem “Tsunami Rising”.

37) The DJ at our first LGBTQ Senior Social thanking the participants for their activism through the years, paving the way for today's generation.

38) Mumu Fresh's tribute to Nipsey Hustle at WordSoundPower.

39) The newly dedicated Joe Melillo Stage Door entrance at the Peter Jay Sharp Building.

40) A Next Wave stage covered in feathers, signaling the start of an exciting new era.

The paradox of uncertain times is that they can also yield great ideas and new alliances. At BAM, 2019 was a year in which we charted new territory and saw our institution thrive.

It was the first year of Artistic Director David Binder’s leadership. His fresh perspectives on performance and the audience experience have been incredibly exciting; David introduced a season of all new artists to BAM and he took us offsite for both intimate indoor and public outdoor experiences.

Thanks to the City of New York, this past year was also a time when we joined up with our cultural colleagues in Brooklyn—651 Arts, MoCADA, and the Brooklyn Public Library—to launch venues that we will soon be able to share with our audiences and community. The BAM Karen will feature new cinemas, a home for our archives, and a state-of-the-art education space.

We also saw the completion of BAM Strong, an enhancement of the spaces surrounding the Harvey Theater, including a visual art gallery for exhibitions, a long-awaited elevator to the balcony of the theater, and a better customer experience overall.

In 2019, we pushed forward in our organization-wide anti-oppression process. This deeply challenging and vital work has compelled us to examine our implicit personal and institutional biases and find ways to implement equity and diversity measures wherever necessary.

All of our artistic platforms—stage performances, films, programs for young people, family experiences, talks, and archival exhibitions—were in full gear, with members of BAM’s programming team coming together to create experiences and share new ideas during, yes, uncertain and challenging times.

To that end, we strive to be a place for everyone. BAM is a cultural resource for all to use, in any way needed or desired. Whether you seek entertainment, escape, or respite; a profound challenge, artist’s perspective, or filmmaker’s vision; a broader view of the world; or simply something new, we are here. All are welcome.

On behalf of everyone at BAM, I wish you a peaceful and joyous new year.

Photo: Caitlin Cronenberg

In visionary writer-director Simon Stone’s powerful contemporary rewrite, Euripides’ controversial icon is reborn. Transposing the devastation of Greek tragedy to a modern American home with a husband and wife in the tumultuous throes of an unraveling marriage, Stone’s stripped-bare staging throws the couple’s every raw emotion into stark relief, from jealousy to passion, humor to despair.

After you've attended the show, let us know what you thought by posting in the comments below and on social media! (Use #Medea and tag us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.)

Program Notes

Medea (PDF)

Read

Article
Simon Stone Faced the Unthinkable. He Thinks You Should Too (The New York Times)
On Stone and the resurgence of myth: “Instead of alienating audiences, he wants to bring them closer, reminding them of the archetypes that persist even in their own lives.”

Article
Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale on Their Life, Their Love, and Doing Medea Together (Vanity Fair)
“We’ve never done anything like this.” The stars of Medea opened up about their choice to take on Stone’s rewrite.

Books
Medea Reading List (Greenlight Bookstore)
Our friends at Greenlight Bookstore curated this reading list on patriarchy, women’s anger, and revenge, featuring works that span the classical era to the present.

Watch

Video
Simon Stone on Revisiting the Myth of Medea (YouTube)
Stone’s understanding of the original myth changed upon closer examination.

Video
Rose Byrne on Portraying a Modern Medea (YouTube)
Byrne discusses her title role.

Video
Bobby Cannavale on How Medea Resonates Today (YouTube)
Cannavale discusses his approach.

Now your turn...

What did you think? Tell us what's on your mind in the comments below or on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

© 2019 Brooklyn Academy of Music, Inc. All rights reserved.

There's a reason there's more than one reference to BAM in playwright and screenwriter Matthew Lopez's four-time Olivier Award-winning play The Inheritance, which reimagines E.M. Forster's Howards End in present-day New York's gay community and is currently running on Broadway: Lopez himself is a member of the BAM Young Producers, a community of BAM supporters in their 20s, 30s and early 40s shaping the future of the arts in Brooklyn. Fellow Young Producer Liz Denys recently sat down with Lopez to talk about his work, his personal connection to BAM, and how he felt about last year's Next Wave.

Liz Denys: I enjoyed reading Howards End, but I was really struck by how much more I connected with the reimagined characters in The Inheritance, particularly how full and personal they were.

Matthew Lopez: It's the benefit of a century's distance from the novel. I had the ability to be more open about myself and my experiences than Forster was able to. When Forster wrote the novel, he didn't have many experiences. He lived a very, very closeted and protected life, so he often wrote about things that he had observed rather than lived. I didn't have that problem. I had the ability to really just write my life, write my experiences, and write my friends' lives and their experiences.

LD: Speaking of your experiences, in the play, Eric mentions that he's going to see a 4-hour play in German at BAM. I laughed so hard at that line, and I wasn't the only person in the audience who reacted strongly to it. Was there a particular production or experience at BAM that you had in mind?

ML: I made it up; there was no one specific thing. I figured the audience would understand that if there was anywhere to go in New York City to see a 4-hour play in German, it would be BAM. I wanted to capture what it felt like to go to BAM, the adventure, and Eric's adventurous spirit when it comes to being a theatergoer and audience member.

LD: I really feel that sense of adventure at BAM, too, especially this past Next Wave.

ML: Next Wave is the central event of our autumn every year. My husband and I always talk about “oh, it's our first BAM date of the season.” I didn't get to see a lot this season because I was in previews almost the moment Next Wave started, but my favorite was The Second Woman.

We had a preview that night, and I had a midnight entrance ticket. I got home around 11:30, and then, I met a friend at BAM. I watched for about an hour, and I was utterly transfixed by it. From the moment it started, I was just like, “I could have sat there all night long.” Then, I went home and went to bed, and the next morning, what was so powerful for me was realizing that it was still going on, that she [Alia Shawkat] was still doing it. My thoughts just immediately went to her. How was she doing? Is she ok? My husband and I had breakfast, and then we went and watched a little bit of it again. It just felt so special: you never get a chance to engage with a piece of work like that, to leave something and know it's still happening, to return and dip back into it. I came back at the end of the day to see it a third time for a little bit.

LD: I felt that same draw to it, and also to In Many Hands, where audience members passed each other all sorts of objects, everything from plants to used coffee grinds to chocolate frosting. I felt a little nervous about the participation element, but knowing I'd recognize so many members of BAM's audiences, being a part of that community, it felt okay.

ML: You mention seeing people you know at BAM and its community. One of the things my play so expressly investigates is what is a community? How is it formed? How is it maintained? What is the relationship and responsibilities between the members of a community? I think what you just described is the perfect example of what a community looks like.

There's a community of people for whom BAM is a central part of their cultural life in New York City, and more than any other place in the city, I run into friends at BAM. You never know who, but you're going to run into someone at BAM, and sometimes, you might be handing them used coffee grounds.

LD: So, obviously, I'm not a gay man, but I was really impressed by how not just accessible, but also immediate and present New York's gay community felt while watching The Inheritance. What's your secret?

ML: I feel the way to achieve universality is to be incredibly personal and very, very specific. I think the smaller something becomes, the bigger something becomes. And no one can accuse The Inheritance of being small, but it's also my least protective play of myself. My challenge to myself was to write as honestly as I can about my experiences as a gay man.

My fear was that the play would be received along the lines of "Well, that's weird, I never experienced that, therefore I can't relate to it." Actually, the opposite has happened across so many different kinds of communities, both within the queer community and outside of the queer community. I wrote about it feeling like my experiences were unique, and I discovered that they're not at all unique.

LD: I see myself seeing The Inheritance 30 years from now for exactly that reason. What do you hope for the future of the play?

ML: I don't know what age will do to the play as it is very much a play about now, but eventually, it will become a period piece. I'm hoping that the characters, if we are to believe that human nature is the same over time, will present endless opportunities for actors and directors and theaters to put their own spin on it. This more than any other thing that I've written wants to be demolished and rebuilt every time. I hope that people take up that challenge and that there are many opportunities in the future for people to come to this play at different points in time, different points in their lives. Maybe, someday we'll see it at BAM!

LD: I hope so, that would be so fun! One of the things I love about BAM is how you get to see so many pieces taken apart and minced up and put back together in so many different, modern, and relevant ways. I feel like The Inheritance is the first production I've seen on Broadway that really encompassed that type of energy.

ML: There's no greater compliment that I can be paid than people saying that seeing The Inheritance is like stepping into BAM. Broadway can be very alienating and expensive, and sometimes, the last thing it feels like is as warm and inviting an experience as BAM is. Which is one of the reasons Stephen [Daldry] has the actors sitting on the stage before the play begins. We want the audience to feel this convivial, welcoming quality to the production.

You know, for me, BAM is a very personal thing. I mean, I can't think of another cultural institution in my life ever that feels so personal. I mean, the only other thing I can think of is the Young Vic and that's for totally different reasons. [The Inheritance premiered at the Young Vic in 2018.] BAM becomes what every theater ought to be: a sacred space. The buildings are just so in service of whatever's on the stage. I walk into the Harvey, and I just remember Cate Blanchett as Blanche DuBois [A Streetcar Named Desire, 2009], seeing the Caryl Churchill play from two seasons ago [Escaped Alone, 2017], watching the Henriad three seasons ago all the way from Richard II straight through to Henry V [2016], which is just so exciting. I can remember all of the experiences I had in that theater. So I think of BAM very personally, almost to the degree of it's mine and mine alone. What are all these other people doing here?

The other thing I'd just mention, too, is that I love the film programming. Not only do I love the first run movies that they show, like being able to go see Parasite for the second time, but also the special programming that they do, the film festivals, and the series. I've seen a number of films that I've never even heard of before, and I'm a person who loves movies and works in the film industry.

LD: Honestly, I feel no FOMO in my life other than around BAM's movie programming. Every time that mailer shows up, without fail, I just feel so much FOMO.

ML: Absolutely, that's where I want to be. I just need more time. There's just not enough time! Maybe that's BAM's new tagline: BAM, there's not enough time! As we say in the play, the BAM Next Wave Festival alone, my God!

David Lan: Simon, why choose this very old play about things that happened very long ago?

Simon Stone: Because what happens in the play keeps happening. The curse of our humanity is that we keep making the same mistakes. We try to escape this destiny, to learn from history, yet there’s a resurgence of these themes, these acts as though there were some kind of cosmic karma. We do these plays because, unfortunately, women still kill their children—infrequently and far less often than men—but it happens, and despite the fact that there’s this ancient story of Medea as a warning.

DL: A warning of what?

SS: Of what happens if we isolate and marginalize women at vulnerable moments of their lives. In the earliest versions of the story, Medea is a witch. She makes potions and casts spells. At the same time, she is woman who sacrifices everything for her husband Jason. She kills members of her own family, becomes a refugee, exhausts all her power by, for example, putting a dragon to sleep. When they arrive in a safe place, Jason realizes it’s to his advantage to transfer allegiance to another family and simply swaps one woman for another with no loyalty to all Medea has given him. That’s a story I see throughout history.

DL: This story existed before Euripides. What did he do to it?

SS: He had the perversity of thought to imagine that the mother would kill her children. In the pre-Euripides version, after Medea has killed Jason and escaped, it’s local citizens who kill the children as revenge for the murder of their King. By the change he made, Euripides created one of those moments where, as in Oedipus, you go, “Wow, he really went there.” We all have dark moments of feverish imagination but nobody writes it or even talks about it. He put the unthinkable into words. Of course, if any woman says “I wish I didn’t have my children,” or “I feel incapable of love for my children”...

DL: Because they’re also the children of the man I hate...

SS: Maybe, but also perhaps because inherently she doesn’t feel motherly and never did. That’s one of the great taboos. People find it easier to imagine Medea as a monster, a witch, so they can separate what she did from what might be the reality in their own home.

DL: So that’s what Euripides did to the story. What did you do to Euripides?

SS: He rewrote the ending of a myth and I rewrote the beginning. I’ve kept what Euripides added and reimagined what happens before and how we get there…and I suppose I’ve drawn on moments I’ve witnessed in my own life, in my own relationships…and I found a person from our world—a case study—called Deborah Green, who committed a similar act in 1995 in Kansas City.

DL: One could say our ability to take old plays and remake them is a great thing because it’s a continuity with our past. On the other hand, Medea is about a terrible act of violence. Why do we go on telling these violent stories?

SS: I believe our idea of progress is another of the great myths. Think of Yemen and Syria, countries that are part of our modern “progressive” world. It’s a stupid myth that nowadays extreme violence only occurs in backward countries. Before the war, Syria was a sophisticated, literate, well educated, outward-looking society. Its elite, educated at Cambridge and Oxford, was capable of extreme acts of terror. Hanging out at university, looking at art, listening to opera doesn’t save you from being a person who tortures or rapes or condones mass murder.

DL: So what saves us?

SS: I don’t believe anything saves us. Some of us have fallen on the lucky side. It’s sheer chance. And “how can we avoid the horror?” is the wrong question. The right question is “how, at this moment in the world in which we’re all living, can we help those who are deep in it?” We should use the historical awareness that it’s not our greater brilliance or our remarkable personalities that have enabled us to avoid it, it’s sheer chance, and the compassion that that understanding gives us should affect the way we react to those in need nowadays. It’s astonishing to me that when great horrors occur some people go, “No, but this time it’s different, this time there’s a reason to have less tolerance for the wave of refugees coming out of Syria or Yemen, this time I need to worry about my security rather than that of others.” It’s not different. It’s the same story over and over again.

Medea runs through Mar 8 at the Harvey Theater at BAM Strong.

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 Ida Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker (1953) with Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973).

By Dana Reinoos

By age 29, Ida Lupino had already acted in more than 40 films, and was fed up. Born in London into the Lupino theatrical family, she made her film debut at age 14, eventually rising from Hollywood bit player to, in her own words, “the poor man’s Bette Davis.” While her collaborations with directors like Cecil B. DeMille, Raoul Walsh, and Michael Curtiz earned her critical acclaim and legions of fans, Lupino often clashed with Warners Brothers boss Jack Warner, refusing to take “undignified” roles and chafing at unwanted script revisions. Her contentious relationship with Warner resulted in multiple suspensions and eventually, in 1947, Lupino left the studio.

Warner Brothers’ loss was film history’s gain, as Lupino entered the next phase of her career, becoming the second-ever mainstream American female filmmaker (after Dorothy Arzner). The Hitch-Hiker, released in 1953 (the same year as her other classic—and final—feature film The Bigamist), was the first film noir directed by a woman. Starting with a classic B-movie pronouncement of quasi-threatening verisimilitude—“What you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you. For the facts are actual.”—The Hitch-Hiker is a drum-tight nightmare road trip. Emmett Myers (an unforgettable William Talman) has hitchhiked his way from Illinois to California and down into Mexico, killing anyone unlucky enough to give him a ride. Of course, fishing buddies Roy (Edmund O’Brien) and Gilbert (Frank Lovejoy) pick up Emmett on their way to the Gulf of California, and their ride of terror through the desolate West begins.

The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

Twenty years later, a young upstart named Terrence Malick made his debut with Badlands, an impressionistic tale of murder on the empty road in the 1950s. Kit (Martin Sheen) is 25, violent and restless; Holly (Sissy Spacek) is 15 and unpopular, bored with her life and possibly a bit of a sociopath. When Holly’s father declares that Kit is not allowed to see his daughter, the lovers, to paraphrase Raymond Pettibon, kill her father, burn down the house, and hit the road. The body count rises as the two make their way from South Dakota to the badlands of Montana, where they meet their fates.

Badlands works as an appropriate title for both films; Emmett’s piecemeal journey of terror across America could have crossed paths with Kit and Holly’s own bloody spree in the Heartland. There’s so much empty, barren land, so many places to go, but nowhere to hide in all that isolation. The isolation is what eventually sours Holly on her and Kit’s rampage, while Emmett’s long monologues suggest that he, too, is starving for connection. Emmett and Kit embody the two sides of the serial killer in the American imagination: Emmett, with his one unclosing eye, is an all-seeing monster without pity, while a running theme in Badlands is how much Kit resembles romantic hero James Dean (and how he uses that to his advantage). Both men feel aggrieved by their station in life and think that the American Dream is within reach, if only everyone would get out of their way.

Badlands (1973)

Lupino’s film is an altogether less romantic one: there’s no love interest, none of Badlands’ tenderness—no women at all, in fact (aside from a brief encounter featuring a small girl in a Mexican shop). While Malick lovingly films Holly’s house aflame, replete with operatic music cues and lush photography, Lupino has no comment on the beauty of violence. Everything in The Hitch-Hiker is ugly, including Emmett’s face. Unlike Kit’s resemblance to a legendary heartthrob, Emmett admits that when he was born, his parents “took one look at this puss of mine and told me to get lost.” Emmett is proud that the media has dubbed him “The Kansas Desperado,” but he doesn’t realize—or care—that the root of desperado is “desperate.”

While Malick would go on to enjoy a storied, handsomely garlanded career of nearly 50 years and counting, Lupino’s directorial career was over after The Bigamist flopped. She would have to be satisfied with her move from “poor man’s Bette Davis” to her later assessment of her career, “poor man’s Don Siegel.” But honestly, Don Siegel never made a film quite like The Hitch-Hiker.

Join us for Beyond the Canon on Sat, Feb 22 at 7pm.

Dana Reinoos is a writer, programmer, and film festival professional based in Milwaukee. Find her on Twitter: @womensrites.

Photos courtesy of:
The Hitch-Hiker: Kino Lorber/Photofest
Badlands: Warner Bros. Pictures
© 2020 Brooklyn Academy of Music, Inc. All rights reserved.

Parasite (2019)

By David Hsieh

Income inequality is often framed as a political and social issue in the United States. But can it be a moral issue? Two very different works—Bong Joon-Hos’ Parasite, currently screening in black and white at BAM Rose Cinemas, and Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck, which BAM audiences can see on February 6 in The Met: Live in HD series—suggest so. [Editor's note: Spoilers follow]

Parasite’s plot revolves around two families in modern day Seoul—one rich (the Parks) and the other poor (the Kims). Although both are nuclear families with parents and two children (one boy, one girl), their lives are very different. The Parks’ patriarch is the head of an IT company; they live in a Philip Johnsonesque house located on a secluded hilltop. The Kims are unemployed adults ekeing out a living by folding pizza boxes. They live in a half-basement susceptible to street fumigation and flooding. But the two families’ fates become linked when the Kims’ son becomes the English tutor for the Parks’ daughter. Through deceit and subterfuge, all four Kims are employed by the Parks.

The film’s pivotal point is a weekend when the Parks take a camping trip to celebrate their son’s birthday. The four Kims gather in the temporarily vacated house and gorge on their employers’ fancy food and drinks. Their elation is short-lived though. First, the former housekeeper whom they contrived to get dismissed, returns with a shocking revelation. Then the Parks return from their canceled trip because of a flood. The Kims need to not only conceal their own misdeeds, but also the former housekeeper’s. This chain of developments lead to the film’s horrifying climax. Bong Joon-Ho expertly manipulates our reaction to the Kims’ behavior—from sympathy to disgust and back to sympathy—throughout the film. One exchange is particularly revealing. When Mrs. Kim comments that the Parks were really nice people despite their wealth, her husband retorts, “They’re nice because they’re rich!” If you’re poor, he’s saying, you do anything you can to get ahead—even if it means putting other people’s lives in danger, as the Kims are forced to.

Wozzeck

The same sentiment is uttered by the eponymous character in Wozzeck, a 1925 opera based on the 19th-century German playwright Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck. It tells the story of a low-ranking soldier driven to kill his common-law wife (and mother of their child), Marie, who has an affair with a drum major.

Wozzeck, as created by Berg, is constantly berated by everyone around him—the captain he runs errands for, the doctor who uses him as a lab rat, and Marie, who cuckolds him. But no matter what he is accused of, his dejected response is always, “I’m poor, and the poor can’t afford morality.”

Mainstream Hollywood may be too wary of victim-blaming to explore this question, but these two foreign works, separated by 100 years and a continent, uncannily express the same sentiment: Are morality and common decency traits only the rich can afford? However, this may be a trick; the rich are hardly angels in these works (nor would you have to look very hard to find virtue in lower economic classes depicted elsewhere). In Parasite, Mr. Park complains of Mr. Kim’s “poor man smell” all the time (although he does have the “decency” not to say it to his face). Moreover, the corruptive codependency between the South Korean government and big corporations, like the one Mr. Park runs, is a major contributor to the economic woe suffered by the Kims.

The captain and the doctor in Wozzeck don’t even bother to hide their contempt. In their condescension, they fail to recognize their own contribution to Wozzeck’s immorality—especially the doctor, who conducts bizarre medical experiments on him with no hesitation. In the Met production by William Kentridge (a BAM artist), the emphasis is on the First World War (Kentridge’s paintings pay tribute to Otto Dix), for which Berg was drafted by the Austro-Hungarian Army. But war alone cannot account for the general moral vacuum in that world.

Tellingly, when the Kims and Wozzeck seize control, they turn not on the rich, but on people even lower on the societal ladder—the former housekeeper and Marie. In a world that measures our value by economic achievement, Joon-Ho and Berg ask, is morality available to anyone, rich or poor?

David Hsieh is a publicity manager at BAM.

Photo credit: Ted Riederer

Never Records is an exhibit and installation at The Rudin Family Gallery at BAM Strong that brings together artists and admirers of the arts. Musicians, spoken word artists, and others with something to share via an audio medium have three hours to record with New York-based conceptual artist and musician Ted Riederer, who created the exhibit, and will leave with a freshly cut vinyl record and a digital file of their music. Visitors to the project, which is in its tenth year, can browse vinyl recordings from Liverpool, Derry (Ireland), London, Lisbon, New Orleans, Victoria, Texas, Amman, and now Brooklyn!

ĀJŌ, a Brooklyn-based singer songwriter who has been performing her quirky brand of R&B and hip hop songs around New York City for nearly a decade, and who I first met when we were both undergraduate students at Columbia University, recorded at Never Records on Feb 9. Before her session, I spoke to her about her music and why she’s looking forward to performing at Never Records.

Photo credit: Rachel Ansley

Akornefa Akyea: How long have you been a singer-songwriter?
ĀJŌ: I've been writing since I was young, but I made half-hearted attempts at writing songs. So I guess I should start counting from when I decided I wanted to pursue this as a career. When I came to college was when I really tried to put these things into practice and explore it by performing for other people.

I remember!
You remember?! Oh my gosh! I can't even flash back to what I think you might remember right now. College was when I joined my first band, you know, like an alt-garage band type of thing. That was kind of the litmus test I had for myself and I thought, "ok, I'm making a serious effort and I want to pursue this more." When that band fell apart, I started formulating plans on how to do this more seriously. So really it was graduating school. So, about nine years.

As a Brooklyn-based artist, what makes Brooklyn an artistic hub for you?
I think it’s the resources, the people, and the number of people. There are so many working minds in a relatively condensed space so there's always a lot happening. The positive result of that is you have a lot of people who are supporters of the arts like, arts administrators, who end up developing programs and spaces and events to showcase artists, and I feel like that is one of the foundational things that makes Brooklyn a hub for me. And then you have, of course, my fellow artists. You also need people who just want to go look at an art gallery or who want to go see that dope new play. Yeah, it's like an ecosystem. I'm not in any way saying it doesn't exist in other places but I definitely have big love for the one I found in Brooklyn. We're really spoiled. It's like, where do you go from here?

Does Brooklyn inspire your songwriting?
Oh yeah, it definitely has. One of the themes I see myself returning to is the idea of home, authenticity and stuff like that. One song in particular that I put out in 2018 is called "Gotta Love It" and it's really like an ode to Brooklyn. I took inspiration from what I saw around me. The video was shot in Brooklyn around my neighborhood and was capturing things I felt made up the essence of what I wanted to cement in history—

Like a time capsule?
Yeah like a visual time capsule. I like that phrase. I went to a roti shop, I captured a dad and son playing basketball at the park, and barber shops.

What are some records that have inspired you?
A classic one that I always think about is TLC's CrazySexyCool. Not only because I was just obsessed with TLC as people—the imagery, they were very much aspirational types of women to me—but their sound and vocal stylings, the production, the things they would talk about just resonated with me. I remember being at my grandma's house and my cousin playing that album along with Toni Braxton and some other things that were out at the time. Missy Elliot and Spice Girls are also on that list. It was so colorful!

Have you ever bought vinyl?
Yeah. I also have some old school turntables, two of them, like I was literally trying to deejay. All I know is, I was on some weird shit. I got some Bette Midler vinyl and then some other dance jams vinyl and I was trying to blend those together...that's as far as I got. But yeah, all my vinyls from that time period are at my mom's house.

You obviously took a stripped-down approach for your NPR Tiny Desk audition; do you plan to do the same for your recording on Sunday?
No. As a matter of fact, we're going all plugged in on Sunday. Originally it was going to be acoustic but Never Records has a backline—kind of equivalent to what a music venue would have—so yeah, we're gonna play plugged.

Do you know what you're performing?
Yeah, I'm going to do "Drop The Clouds" which is a metaphor for, like, drop the facade or drop the act. That song is from my 2017 EP called Déjà Boo, which were all songs kind of chronicling different moments and perspectives in a relationship. I think this is a great song to record live, because of the way that song presents live is totally different than the studio version.

Who will you be performing with?
I'll be playing with John Feliciano, Justin Carter, and Misha Savage, the Silky savage.

Why are you excited to participate in Never Records?
I think it's going to be challenging recording live. I don't wanna shy away from the challenge. All the recording I've done, I've recorded myself in an environment I chose, and this is taking the control out of my hands for the recording process, which may be a great thing but is a little intimidating. I like the idea of collecting the sounds of different cities. If you zoom out, every city probably has a spirit behind it that you can begin to identify. The vinyls from New Orleans are going to be totally different from the vinyls from New York, and that's whether he's recording somebody who's spitting a poem or telling a story or someone who's playing music or just playing an instrument. I feel like the environment colors the things that people want to record, and I find it exciting to be a part of whatever the fabric of New York’s sound is gonna be. I like the idea of someone else in another city or another country being able to flip through that.

Visit Never Records at The Rudin Family Gallery at BAM through Mar 15. Don’t forget, you’re welcome to witness the live recordings!

Dive into this preview of what's coming to our screens in March, featuring original commentary from members of the film programming team.

Kelly Reichardt Selects: First Cow in Context

Through Mar 4

Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (Mar 1 & 3).

The series also features Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (Mar 1), Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (Mar 2), Jean Rouch’s Little By Little (Mar 2), Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy As Lazzaro (Mar 3), and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge.

First Cow
Opens March 13

Rise Up!: Portraits of Resistance

Mar 6—12

From Jesse Trussell, Repertory and Specialty Film Programmer:

“With a righteous anger rarely seen in cinema made at this scale, Bacurau(opening Mar 13) buried itself in my brain with a chilling metaphor: one day a rural community of black, brown, and indigenous Brazilians comes to discover they’ve been erased from satellite maps. Long one of Brazil’s most important political artists, Kleber Mendonça Filho (Neighboring Sounds, Aquarius)—co-directing here with his longtime production designer Juliano Dornelles—presents a damning depiction of global white supremacy as embodied by the rise of reactionary right wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (naturally, a Donald Trump ally). Filho has himself been targeted and pressured financially by the Bolsonaro government, and it’s impossible not to think about that when you’re viewing the film. In a climate where the ruling government has been linked to the killings of left-wing Afro-Brazilian activists and politicians like Marielle Franco, making this film is itself an act of bravery and political resistance. Deeply inspired by Bacurau, co-programmer Ashley Clark and I immediately saw the film as connected to a long history of films made about, with, and by communities of color that have worked in collective resistance. We’ve programmed a complimentary series of works with the same galvanizing spirit: from Frantz Fanon inspired anti-colonial action in Algeria (The Battle of Algiers) to Bolivian indigenous labor organizing (Courage of the People) to modern depictions of corrupt capitalism in Senegal (Atlantics).”

Bacurau

Opens Mar 13

Beyond the Canon: Perfumed Nightmare + The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

Sun, Mar 8

This month's edition of Beyond the Canon unites two kindred spirits: legendary German director Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo, Grizzly Man) and the less well-known—in the West—but equally brilliant Filipino maverick Kidlat Tahimik. Born just one month apart in 1942, the two men first met in 1972 when Tahimik was in Germany following an unsuccessful stint selling Filipino souvenirs at the Munich Olympics. Herzog cast Tahimik in a small role in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, an experience which inspired Tahimik to move behind the camera, leading to his first feature, the sui generis travelogue Perfumed Nightmare.

Programmers’ Notebook: On Solitude

Mar 20—31

Vitalina Varela

From Ashley Clark, Director, Film Programming:

“Any new film from the Portuguese master Pedro Costa is an event to be anticipated. Even so, I was quite taken aback by the strength of my emotional reaction to his latest work Vitalina Varela, in which a Cape Verdean woman (brilliantly played by the eponymous nonprofessional actor Varela) travels to Lisbon to attend her husband’s funeral after being separated from him for decades, and slowly attempts to start her life again. Hypnotically paced, exquisitely shot in deep, dark colors strafed with occasional shards of light, and composed with the rigor of a Rembrandt, the film’s mere existence presents an air-tight case for the primacy of the big screen experience.

Varela’s lonely plight—a fraught navigation through mortality, soured romance, shattered dreams, and the sheer, crushing weight of colonial history—got me thinking about how the condition of solitude has been expressed cinematically. This subject made perfect sense as the central hook for the latest edition of our ongoing series Programmers’ Notebook, in which myself and my BAM Film colleagues Gina Duncan, Jesse Trussell, and Natalie Erazo pick some of our favorite films around a single theme. Vitalina Varela is the lodestar of a diverse, international program which celebrates and explores the pleasure and pain of being alone. As the act of being alone with oneself can deepen our understanding of both ourselves and the world, these rich, insightful films are not just about loneliness, but also the qualities of strength, fortitude, resilience, character, and self-discovery that often accompany it.”

Screen Epiphanies: Young Jean Lee Presents Oldboy

Mon, Mar 30

Oldboy (2003)

This month playwright and filmmaker Young Jean Lee presents Park Chan-wook’s 2003 film Oldboy. A BAMcinemaFest alum, Lee was interviewed for the BAM blog back in 2014 and featured in a New York Times profile from 2018.

Young Jean Lee

In Case You Missed It

In February we screened Horace Jenkins long-lost gem of Black independent cinema Cane River (1982). We welcomed actors Richard Romain and Tommye Myrick opening weekend, as well as Jenkins' children Dominique and Sacha Jenkins. For more on Cane River, check out the Critics’ Pick review from The New York Times.

(L to R) Cane River stars Richard Romain and Tommye Myrick following a screening of Cane River. Photo: Lara Atallah.

(L to R) Director of Film Programming Ashley Clark, Cane River stars Richard Romain and Tommye Myrick, and Sacha Jenkins (son of filmmaker Horace Jenkins) following a screening of Cane River. Photo: Lara Atallah

(L to R) Director of Film Programming Ashley Clark and Alan Palomo (aka Neon Indian). Photo: Lara Atallah

The February edition of Screen Epiphanies featured a screening of the ultra-stylish, cooler-than-cool French thriller Diva, introduced by Alan Palomo (aka Neon Indian).

RIOPOP: An Inoah-Inspired Playlist

Nudity and the Work of Dimitris Papaioannou

What’s in a Name: When Eddy Became Édouard Louis

“Poke fun in a way that makes you feel optimistic”: A Conversation with Maira Kalman

Beyond the Canon: In the Cut + Klute

Future Unknown: A Conversation with Brett Story

The Barber Shop As A Sacred Space

Africa Unite!: A Playlist Inspired By Barber Shop Chronicles

Perfecting the Vibe: Wisdom From Four Brooklyn Barbers

Holidays at BAM: Cabaret and Beyond

24 Hours with Alia Shawkat

The 40 Most Unforgettable BAM Moments of 2019, According to BAM Staff

A New Year Message From Katy Clark, President of BAM

In Context: Medea

Matthew Lopez on The Inheritance and BAM

A Conversation Between Medea Writer/Director Simon Stone and Producer David Lan

Beyond the Canon: The Hitch-Hiker + Badlands

Morality in Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite and Alban Berg’s Wozzeck

Never Records Artist Spotlight: ĀJŌ

Monthly Film Digest: March

Kelly Reichardt Selects: First Cow in Context

Rise Up!: Portraits of Resistance

Beyond the Canon: Perfumed Nightmare + The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

Programmers’ Notebook: On Solitude

Screen Epiphanies: Young Jean Lee Presents Oldboy

In Case You Missed It