The Bang on a Can Marathon moves to the Brooklyn Museum for its thirtieth anniversary (photo © Ben Gancsos)
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, May 6, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org
The May edition of the free First Saturday program at the Brooklyn Museum focuses on the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the innovative new-music ensemble that held its first marathon concert in 1987. On May 6, the group will be at the Brooklyn Museum for its thirtieth anniversary, performing from 2:00 to 10:00. (Suggested admission is $16 before 5:00 and free after.) “Thirty years ago we started dreaming of the world we wanted to live in,” founding members David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe said in a statement. “It would be a kind of utopia for music: all the boundaries between composers would come down, all the boundaries between genres would come down, all the boundaries between musicians and audience would come down. Then we started trying to build it. Building a utopia is a political act – it pushes people to change. It is also an act of resistance to the things that keep us apart.” In addition to the marathon, there will be pop-up teen apprentice gallery discussions in “Life, Death, and Transformation in the Americas”; a Found Sound Nation interactive workshop in which you can record in the Mobile Street Studio; David Parker’s Turing Tests, a Brooklyn Dance Festival presentation featuring dancers from the Bang Group, with a score by Dean Rosenthal; a hands-on art workshop in which participants can make their own musical instrument and then join the Orchestra of Original Instruments in the Biergarten, with Bang on a Can All-Star guitarist and instrument designer Mark Stewart; and pop-up poetry and conga drumming curated by Jaime Lee Lewis, with Jennifer Falu, Hadaiyah Bey, Ahlaam Abduljalil, and Jamie Falu. In addition, you can check out such exhibits as “Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller,” “Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty,” “Infinite Blue,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85,” and, at a discounted admission price of $12, “Georgia O’Keefe: Living Modern.”