Tag Archives: brooklyn academy of music

A NEW YORK SEASON: POWER

Reggie Wilson’s Power explores Black Shakers and spirituality (photo by Christopher Duggan / courtesy Jacob’s Pillow)

POWER
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Harvey Theater at BAM Strong
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
January 13-15, $25-$55, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/power

Reggie Wilson and his Fist & Heel Performance Group — “Not Just Your Mama’s Post-Modern Dance Company” — return to their home borough of Brooklyn for the New York City premiere of Power, running January 13-15 at the Harvey Theater at BAM Strong. Held in conjunction with BAM’s annual celebration of MLK Day, Power is an exhilarating seventy-minute piece about freedom and spirituality set in the world of the Shakers, asking the questions “What would the worship of Black Shakers actually have looked like?” and “How were the general, core Shaker tenets of ‘heaven on earth’ realized (social activism, pacifism, gender equality, celibacy, and the confession of sin)?”

Choreographed by Wilson and inspired by Black Shaker Eldress Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson, Shaker foundress Mother Ann Lee, the First Great Awakening (the Evangelical Revival), and American Utopianism and Binary Opposition (as well as Wilson’s 1995 The Littlest Baptist), the work is performed by eight dancers and three vocalists, with costumes by Naoko Nagata and Enver Chakartash and lighting by Jonathan Belcher, featuring songs by the Staple Singers, Bessie Jones & St. Simon’s Island Singers, Meredith Monk, Craig Loftis, Omar Thiam with Jam Begum & Khady Saar, and others. Power was developed at Danspace Project, then Jacob’s Pillow and the nearby Hancock Shaker Village.

“The idea of spirituality, religiosity, being able to be manifested with the body in relationship with other bodies is something really kind of exciting, so when I heard specifically about Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson in Philadelphia having a Black Shaker community, it seemed like there were two worlds that I had never actually put together in my imagination,” Wilson says in the above BAM behind-the-scenes video. “It also seemed parallel to my eternal and ongoing obsession with thinking about Black and Africanist traditions in relationship to white or postmodern performance or religions.”

Power is part of BAM’s program “A New York Season,” which continues with Pam Tanowitz Dance’s Four Quarters and Kyle Abraham’s An Untitled Love in February and SITI Company’s The Medium and Mark Morris’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato in March.

IN CONVERSATION WITH MERCE: LANDROVER

Jacquelin Harris and Chalvar Monteiro perform excerpts from Merce Cunningham’s Landrover in online celebration (photo by Maria Baranova)

Who: Jacquelin Harris and Chalvar Monteiro, Mariah Anton and Cemiyon Barber, Claude “CJ” Johnson and Donovan Reed, Patricia Lent, Kyle Abraham, Liz Gerring
What: Celebration of Merce Cunningham’s Landrover
Where: Baryshnikov Arts Center online
When: September 20-30, free
Why: In honor of the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of Merce Cunningham’s Landrover, which premiered at BAM on February 1, 1972, the Baryshnikov Arts Center is presenting the free online program “In Conversation with Merce,” available on demand through September 30 at 5:00. The work, described by Cunningham as “people moving in different landscapes. American perhaps in the sense that we move in our country — across varied spaces — with varied backgrounds,” featured an original score by John Cage, David Tudor, and Gordon Mumma, boasted costumes by Jasper Johns, and was performed by Carolyn Brown, Ulysses Dove, Douglas Dunn, Meg Harper, Nanette Hassall, Susana Hayman-Chaffey, Chris Komar, Sandra Neels, Chase Robinson, Valda Setterfield, and Cunningham.

Mariah Anton and Cemiyon Barber perform in Liz Gerring’s Dialogue as part of BAC’s Merce tribute (photo by Maria Baranova)

“This program is the latest realization of a concept we began experimenting with during Merce Cunningham’s centennial,” Merce Cunningham Trust trustee Patricia Lent says in an introduction. “At its core is the idea of exploring Merce’s work as a resource for generating new work by contemporary artists.” Beautifully filmed by Tatyana Tenenbaum at BAC’s John Cage & Merce Cunningham Studio, “In Conversation with Merce” starts with a thirteen-minute excerpt of Landrover, a series of solos performed by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater members Chalvar Monteiro in green and Jacquelin Harris in brown, moving about the spare space dominated by large windows and a mirrored wall, as the music fades to silence. (The lovely costumes for all three pieces are by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung.)

That is followed by two specially commissioned works made in response to Landrover, each introduced by the choreographer, beginning with Liz Gerring’s nine-minute Dialogue, in which Mariah Anton in yellow and Cemiyon Barber in white display numerous geometric possibilities of the human body, set to minimalist music by Michael Schumacher. “In Conversation” concludes with Kyle Abraham’s fourteen-minute MotorRover, a slow, intimate duet performed by Claude “CJ” Johnson and Donovan Reed in loose-fitting two-color costumes, the only sound that of the air-conditioning. BAC has presented a bevy of terrific filmed programs during the pandemic, and this is yet another winner; coming up next are digital works by Mats Ek and Ana Laguna, River L. Ramirez, Sooraj Subramaniam, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Ella Rothschild, and Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith.

SUN & SEA (MARINA)

Sun & Sea brings the beach to BAM in thrilling production (photo by Barbara Pollack)

SUN & SEA (MARINA)
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
September 15-26, $25
www.bam.org

The summer beach season might unofficially come to a close on Labor Day weekend, but BAM has extended it through September 26 with the US premiere of Sun & Sea, a wonderfully engaging indoor presentation that brings fun in the sun to Fort Greene. Winner of the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, the hour-long opera takes place on the 57×46-square-foot floor of BAM Fisher, where twenty-one tons of sand have been trucked in from South Jersey and spread out two inches deep. One hundred audience members at a time watch the show from the balcony that surrounds the stage on all four sides; you can walk around to see it from numerous angles as thirteen vocalists and about two dozen locals sing about the environment, bananas, colonialism, the threat of drowning, exhaustion, running out of water, tourism, littering, work, and vacation.

The unnamed characters do what people on the beach generally do: eat, drink, read books and magazines, apply suntan lotion, talk with one another, snooze, and catch rays. Kids play badminton, two men battle it out in a friendly game of ring toss, people check their cell phones, and a dog (Beans or Grimaldi) wanders about while certain characters break into song as the action continues around them. Wealthy Mommy (Kalliopi Petrou) confesses, “What a relief that the Great Barrier Reef has a restaurant and hotel!” Her husband, Workaholic (Vytautas Pastarnokas), surmises, “Suppressed negativity finds a way out unexpectedly.”

The Philosopher (Claudia Graziadei) asks, “Is this not a parody of the Silk Road?” Complaining Lady (Eglė Paškevičienė) declares, “What’s wrong with people?” And one of the young men from the Volcano Couple (Marco Cisco and Lucas Lopes Pereira) opines, “Not a single climatologist predicted a scenario like this / Maybe someone had a feeling.” Hope is embodied by Chanson of Admiration (Nabila Dandara Vieira Santos), who gently conveys, “O la vida.”

Among the others chiming in on income inequality, lava, shrimp, 3D printers, the extinction of the mammoth, and the end of the world are Bossanova Woman (Svetlana Bagdonaitė) and Bossanova Man (Jonas Statkevičius), Dreamer (Artūras Miknaitis), Siren (Ieva Skorubskaitė), 3D Sisters (Auksė Dovydėnaitė and Saulė Dovydėnaitė), and two Choir Singers (Aliona Alymova and Evaldas Alekna). The singing is all matter-of-fact, as if the characters’ thoughts are calmly emerging, one no more urgent than another, set to a shimmering score, mixed live by Salomėja Petronytė, that glistens like sunlight on the ocean. Each audience member is given a printout of the libretto; I got a kick out of peeking at who was next and guessing who the performer would be. (I batted about fifty percent.) Photos are allowed (but not video), and you can stay as long as you want, as the performance repeats for five hours.

Commissioned for the Lithuanian Pavilion at the fifty-eighth Venice Biennale and featuring an all-female creative team, the ingenious Sun & Sea is the second collaboration between director and set designer Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, librettist Vaiva Grainytė, and composer and musical director Lina Lapelytė, the Lithuanian trio’s follow-up to its 2013 show, Have a Good Day!, in which ten cashiers took on capitalism and consumption. It’s a seamless production, like a day at the beach; you can imagine yourself on the sand with the cast, hearing snippets of conversations here, admiring bathing suits there, wishing the kids wouldn’t run across your blanket, and turning over to get an even tan.

But as relaxed as you might feel, there is a rising tide of fear at the future of the planet if we remain on our current path. As the Vacationers’ Chorus intones, “Today they have raised the red and yellow flag up high / The whirlpools of the sea, / drop-offs / riptides / undertows. / You’re not allowed / to wade in / deeper than your knees!” If we don’t start doing something about our environment fast, there’ll be no more beaches or oceans for safe wading at all.

THAT KINDNESS: NURSES IN THEIR OWN WORDS

V introduces her new streaming play, That Kindness: Nurses in their Own Words

Who: V (formerly Eve Ensler), Ed Blunt, Connie Britton, Rosario Dawson, Stephanie Hsu, LaChanze, Liz Mikel, Rosie O’Donnell, Billy Porter, Dale Soules, Marisa Tomei, Monique Wilson
What: New streaming play
Where: BAM YouTube
When: October 15 – November 3, free (donations encouraged)
Why: Ten years ago, playwright and activist V, formerly known as Eve Ensler, went public with her diagnosis of uterine cancer. “I am lucky. I have been blessed with a positive prognosis that has made me hyper-aware of what keeps a person alive,” she wrote in the Guardian while relating it to the work she was doing with City of Joy in Democratic Republic of Congo to help young survivors of gender violence. “How does one survive cancer? Of course — good doctors, good insurance, good luck. But the real healing comes from not being forgotten. From attention, from care, from love, from being surrounded by a community of those who demand information on your behalf, who advocate and stand up for you when you are in a weakened state, who sleep by your side, who refuse to let you give up, who bring you meals, who see you not as a patient or victim but as a precious human being, who create metaphors where you can imagine your survival. This is my medicine, and nothing less will suffice for the people, for the women, for the children of Congo.”

V, in collaboration with James Lecense, is now paying tribute to the purveyors of such care, nurses, whom she calls “radical angels of the heart,” in the new virtual play That Kindness: Nurses in their Own Words. The seventy-five-minute piece, streaming on BAM’s YouTube channel, features Ed Blunt, Connie Britton, Rosario Dawson, Stephanie Hsu, LaChanze, Liz Mikel, Rosie O’Donnell, Billy Porter, Dale Soules, Marisa Tomei, and Monique Wilson portraying real-life nurses sharing stories about who they are, what they do, and why they are in their profession; the dialogue is based on conversations and interviews V, whose previous work includes The Vagina Monologues, The Treatment, and her 2018 one-woman show, In the Body of the World, did with these front-line health care workers. Divided into such sections as “What Is a Nurse?,” “Things I Am Most Proud Of,” “Morally Wounded,” and “‘We Are Not Expendable,’” the narrative shifts from nursing in general to the more specific situation of the Covid-19 crisis as the nurses dig deeper into themselves and the importance of genuine care, especially at a time when so many hospitals are going private, being run like corporations, even during a pandemic. The show, reminiscent of the Public Theater’s The Line, which consisted of the words of doctors, nurses, EMTs, and other brave heroes during the coronavirus crisis, was produced in partnership with National Nurses United and California Nurses Association; BAM’s presentation is free to watch through November 3, but donations are requested for the Brooklyn Hospital Foundation’s Covid-19 Fund. Be sure to stick around for Morley’s closing song.

MEDEA

Real-life partners Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale star in Simon Stone’s sizzling Medea at BAM (photo by Richard Termine)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. at Ashland Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 8, $45-$195
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/medea

As you enter BAM’s elegantly shabby chic Harvey Theater to see Simon Stone’s Medea, there are two young boys already onstage, one stretched out on the floor, on his laptop, the other leaning against a wall, on his smartphone. Bob Cousins’s dramatic cyclorama set is blindingly white, evoking a heavenly way station, making it look as if the unconcerned brothers are floating in a mysterious void. In this riveting adaptation, inspired by Euripides’s 431 BC original and the true story of Dr. Debora Green, who committed horrific crimes against her family in Kansas in 1995, Stone instantly puts us in the kids’ shoes. It’s a thrillingly uncomfortable moment since, of course, this is Medea, and we know it will not end well for the siblings. And getting there is indeed heart-wrenching.

Contemporary stand-ins for Jason and Medea, Lucas (Bobby Cannavale) and Anna (Rose Byrne) are married pharmaceutical scientists facing a crisis. Anna has just been released from a psychiatric facility after having done something bad to Lucas, who is in a relationship with a woman half his age, Clara (Madeline Weinstein), the daughter of their boss, Christopher (Dylan Baker). Anna plans to simply walk back into their old life with their two sons, Edgar (Gabriel Amoroso or Jolly Swag) and (Gus Emeka or Orson Hong Guindo), but Lucas has other ideas. “I know your trust will be hard to regain. What I did to you,” Anna says. “We don’t need to talk about it now,” Lucas replies. Anna: “No, I want to. It was a breach of trust. Most importantly it was trust that we lost.” Lucas: “I’m not —” Anna: “In all those messy months we lost sight of everything we’d promised to be to each other and both of us did that but I overstepped the line —” Lucas: “We should never have stayed together this long.” A determined Anna later adds, “I’m going to win you back.” That does not go so well either.

Social worker Elsbeth (Jordan Boatman) does not have the easiest of jobs monitoring Anna (Rose Byrne) and her two young sons (photo by Richard Termine)

Medea is ripe for reinterpretation, particularly in a world rife with misogyny and violence. In the past ten years I have seen Aaron Mark’s Another Medea, Limb Hyoung-taek’s Medea and Its Double, and Luis Alfaro’s Mojada, all of which took the central story and reimagined it in unique and compelling ways. Born in Basel and raised in England and Australia, Stone, who moves all around the globe, rarely settling down for an extended period of time, has previously adapted such classics as The Wild Duck, Miss Julie, John Gabriel Borkman, Peer Gynt, Three Sisters, and Hamlet and dazzled New York audiences with his sizzling Yerma at Park Avenue Armory in 2018, infusing his work with personal experience, as he does again with Medea.

The set features one large rectangular white wall that occasionally rises to serve as a projection screen, showing either extreme close-ups of the action, primarily a spellbinding Byrne, her evocative eyes searching for meaning, or live-stream shots by Edgar, who is making an autobiographical film for school. (The video design is by Julia Frey, with bright lighting by Sarah Johnston.) The play was originally performed at live-streaming master and BAM fixture Ivo van Hove’s Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (formerly Toneelgroep Amsterdam); the video footage can get to be a bit too much, so it’s a relief when the device goes away in the latter parts of the eighty-minute production, when things really heat up.

The cast is all new for this US premiere, with solid support led by Tony and Emmy nominee Baker (La Bête, Happiness, The Americans) and Weinstein (The Real Thing, Mary Page Marlowe) in addition to Victor Almanzar as bookstore owner Herbert, who offers Anna a job, and Jordan Boatman as Elsbeth, the social worker in charge of her case, keeping a close watch on her treatment of Gus and Edgar. At one point Stone makes a tongue-in-cheek reference to the finale of The Sopranos that is a wry riff on what ultimately happens in his take on Medea, as two famous families meet their fate.

Anna (Rose Byrne) is none too happy that her husband, Lucas (Bobby Cannavale), is now with Clara (Madeline Weinstein) in contemporary update of Medea (photo by Richard Termine)

Byrne (Bridesmaids, You Can’t Take It with You) plays Anna with a strong-willed vulnerability; she is no mere woman scorned, seeking revenge, but an intelligent wife, mother, and scientist who had the deck stacked against her and refuses to sit back and let everyone walk over her. She has a fiery, passionate chemistry with Cannavale (The Hairy Ape, The Lifespan of a Fact), who also displays a strong-willed vulnerability, allowing the cracks in Lucas’s armor to show through. “She created this instability,” Clara argues to Lucas. “I did too,” he readily admits. This is a Medea that could only be created in today’s #MeToo sociopolitical climate.

The Australian Byrne and New Jersey native Cannavale are real-life partners with two young boys of their own; after going through hell onstage, they head back to their nearby Gowanus apartment to be with their kids. Byrne and Cannavale work together often on television and in film, but this is the first time they are acting opposite each other onstage; later this year they will portray another married couple in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge for the Sydney Theatre Company. At the start of Medea, Anna shows Lucas a painting she made while at the asylum, depicting Noah’s ship in a storm, in which all the animals are drowning. “They thought they were safe and then another storm whipped up and capsized the ark,” Anna tells a confused Lucas. She continues, “You see the dead dove floating on the swell over there? With the olive branch still in its mouth?” It’s a metaphor for Anna’s state of mind, but one can also think of it as a kind of peace offering between Byrne and Cannavale as they return to a normal life following the searing heartbreak their characters experience night after night.

TICKET ALERT — ST. PETERSBURG BALLET THEATRE: SWAN LAKE

St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre makes its US debut in February with Swan Lake at BAM (photo by KT)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
February 15-16, $35-$135, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
spbt.ru

Internationally acclaimed Russian prima ballerina Irina Kolesnikova and the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre will make their US debut February 15-16 at BAM with their lush and lavish production of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Rejected by the Kirov and the Bolshoi because of her size, Kolesnikova ultimately made a home — and a family — with the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre, eventually marrying founder Konstantin Tachkin, with whom she has two children. They’ve come a long way since he called her a “little red lump in a T-shirt” when she auditioned at the age of ten.

Not to be confused with the St Petersburg Festival Ballet or the St Petersburg State Ballet — the name issue is currently in court — the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre has toured with such classics as The Nutcracker, Giselle, Cinderella, and The Sleeping Beauty, but their gem is Swan Lake, with two dozen swans and Kolesnikova as Odette/Odile. At BAM, they will be accompanied by the Chamber Orchestra of New York, conducted by Timur Gorkovenko. The Vaganova-trained Kolesnikova also has performed the title role in the company’s Her Name Was Carmen, its unique take on the Georges Bizet ballet based on Prosper Mérimée’s novella, with the setting moved to a refugee site, inspired by her 2016 visit to Balkan camps.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: HAMNET

Dead Centre makes its BAM debut with Hamnet (photo by Ernesto Galan)

BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
October 30 – November 3, $25
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/hamnet
www.deadcentre.org

New BAM artistic director David Binder continues his season of BAM debuts with Hamnet, presented by Ireland’s Dead Centre. In 1585, William Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, gave birth to twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith. Hamnet died tragically in 1596 at the age of eleven; three years later, the Bard wrote perhaps his greatest play, Hamlet, at least partly about a young man haunted by the death of his father. Founded in 2012 by Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd and based between Dublin and London, Dead Centre has previously staged Beckett’s Room, Lippy, (S)quark!, Souvenir, Chekhov’s First Play, and Shakespeare’s Last Play; all but Lippy deal with writers, including James Joyce and Marcel Proust in addition to Samuel Beckett, Anton Chekhov, and Shakespeare. It has long been debated whether Shakespeare wrote Hamlet specifically in reaction to the death of his son, or whether Hamnet also inspired part of other works. For example, in King John, published in 1623, Constance says, “Grief fills the room up of my absent child.”

“Over centuries of feverish speculation, the most compelling reflections on the presence of Shakespeare’s emotional life in his plays — preeminently, James Joyce’s brilliant pages in Ulysses, but there are many others — have focused on Hamlet,” Shakespeare expert Stephen Greenblatt wrote in 2014 in the New York Review of Books. “This biographical attention to a work deriving from recycled materials and written for the public stage would seem inherently implausible, were it not for the overwhelming impression on readers and spectators alike that the play must have emerged in an unusually direct way from the playwright’s inner life, indeed that at moments the playwright was barely in control of his materials. I will attempt in what follows to trace Hamlet back to a personal experience of grief and to sketch a long-term aesthetic strategy that seems to have emerged from this experience.” The sixty-minute multimedia piece, running October 30 to November 3 at BAM Fisher, features text and direction by Moukarzel and Kidd, with dramaturgy by Michael West, set design by Andrew Clancy, costumes by Grace O’Hara, lighting by Stephen Dodd, sound by Kevin Gleeson, video by Jose Miguel Jimenez, and choreography by Liv O’Donoghue. Aran Murphy plays Hamnet, addressing the audience directly as he shares his tragic tale.