Tag Archives: brooklyn academy of music

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: REQUEST CONCERT

Danuta Stenka (KRUM) returns to BAM in one-woman show, REQUEST CONCERT, at BAM Fisher (photo by Klaudyna Schubert)

WUNSCHKONZERT
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
October 26-29, $25, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Polish companies Laznia Nowa Theater and TR Warszawa (Nosferatu, Festen) have teamed up for Request Concert, a one-character show running at the BAM Fisher October 26-29. Translated by Danuta Żmij-Zielińska from German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz’s 1971 hyperrealistic play, Request Concert features Danuta Stenka as Fräulein Rasch, an average woman going about her average life, a fifty-year-old stenographer returning home after a day at work. Taking aim at loneliness in modern society, the seventy-five-minute production is directed by Yana Ross, with music by Aśka Grochulska and Tomasz Wyszomirski, lighting by Mats Öhlin, and multimedia set design by Simona Biekšaitė. “Karl Marx defines a time ripe for revolution when the masses are fed up with oppression and the elite is no longer able to control them,” Ross explained shortly before the play’s premiere in Poland. “But what if the financial elite has adapted with the times and worked out a way to keep the masses more or less occupied with consumerism, keeping them busy with enough daily small rewards and pleasures to forget the pain of a senseless cycle of life?” All tickets for the dialogue-free show, being staged in the round at the intimate Fishman Space, are $25, and attendees are encouraged to walk around to experience Fräulein Rasch’s futility from all angles.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: BATTLEFIELD

Sean O’Callaghan, Carole Karemera, Ery Nzaramba, Jared McNeill, and Toshi Tsuchitori in BATTLEFIELD (photo by Richard Termine)

Sean O’Callaghan, Carole Karemera, Ery Nzaramba, Jared McNeill, and Toshi Tsuchitori appear in BATTLEFIELD at BAM (photo by Richard Termine)

Next Wave Festival
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
Through October 9, $30-$110
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.bouffesdunord.com

“To hell with the state of humanity,” the blind king Dritarashtra (Sean O’Callaghan) says at the beginning of Battlefield, Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne’s return to their international triumph, The Mahabharata. It’s also a return home for the ancient Sanskrit epic to the BAM Harvey, previously an abandoned movie house that was renovated back in the late 1980s specifically for the nine-hour Mahabharata. In Battlefield, codirectors Brook and Estienne and their C.I.C.T. — Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord company explore a central section of The Mahabharata, focusing on the aftermath of the bloody battle between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, which left millions dead. The sparse stage is littered with bamboo sticks that represent the victims of the fierce war; there is also a small black rectangular block where various characters sit, mournfully understanding that there is little difference between victory and defeat. The new king, Yudhishthira (Jared McNeill), seeks advice from a soothsayer (Ery Nzaramba, who also plays several victims) and learns a devastating secret from his mother, Kunti (Carole Karemera), while Toshi Tsuchitori, who also performed in the original Mahabharata, sits in a chair off to the side, playing powerfully moving percussion on his African drum. The play evokes both Shakespeare and Brook and Estienne’s adaptation of The Suit, but it is too often flat and lackluster. There are some wonderful moments, particularly the use of colored scarves to identify the characters (the costumes are by Oria Puppo) in addition to sticks that represent various objects, but the stripped-down seventy-minute production feels like it’s all middle, with no beginning or end, existing in its own unclear time and space, even as it makes relevant connections to what is going on in the world today. Brook will participate in a discussion following the October 6 performance. The play runs through October 9, after which BAMcinématek will present the series “Peter Brook: Behind the Camera,” consisting of nine of the Paris-based English director’s films, beginning October 10 at 7:00 with his five-and-a-half-hour adaptation of The Mahabharata, which he will introduce, and continuing through October 20 with such works as The Beggar’s Opera, Lord of the Flies, Swann in Love, King Lear (starring Paul Scofield), and a week-long run of 1968’s Tell Me Lies (A Film About London).

PHAEDRA(S)

(photo courtesy of Odéon Théâtre De L’Europe) Avec: Isabelle Huppert, Agata Buzek, Andrzej Chyra, Alex Descas, Gael Kamilindi, Norah Krief, Rosalba Torres Guerrero. (photo by Pascal Victor/ArtComArt)

Krzysztof Warlikowski’s ambitious but bewildering PHAEDRA(S) had them running for the exits at BAM (photo by Pascal Victor/ArtComArt; courtesy of Odéon Théâtre De L’Europe)

PHAÈDRE(S)
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
September 13-18, $30-$95
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

About halfway through the second act of Krzysztof Warlikowski’s three-and-a-half-hour Phaedra(s), continuing at BAM’s Harvey Theater through September 18, two people jumped over from the crowded row behind us and ran out through our far-more-empty row, barreling past us in a desperate attempt to get out of the theater as fast as they could. They probably regretted not leaving at intermission, as so many others had, allowing the rest of the audience to jockey for better seats. But even better seats didn’t significantly help Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe’s dark and lurid multiple retelling of the Greek myth of Phaedra, the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë and wife of Theseus who is made to fall in love with her stepson, Hippolyte, by the spurned Aphrodite. Isabelle Huppert, previously at BAM’s Next Wave Festival in 2005 in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychose and in 2009 in Robert Wilson’s Quartett, plays Aphrodite, three versions of Phaedra, and Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee’s 2003 novel. The first act, based on writings by Wajdi Mouawad and inspired by Euripides and Seneca, inexplicably begins with the musical recitation of the Arabic poem “At-Atlal,” with no English-language translation as singer Norah Krief, dancer and choreographer Rosalba Torres Guerrero, and guitarist Grégoire Léauté turn in a head-scratching glam-rock performance. Soon Phaedra is trying to clean the blood pouring from between her legs while considering whether to bed down with Hippolyte (Gaël Kamilindi).

Isabelle Huppert appears as multiple Phaedras in Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe production at BAM (photo courtesy of Odéon Théâtre De L’Europe)

In the second section, adapted from Kane’s Phaedra’s Love, a sloppy and messed-up Hippolyte (Andrzej Chyra), who has already slept with Phaedra’s daughter, Strophe (Agata Buzek), wants nothing to do with stepmom Phaedra no matter how much she insists on having some form of sex with him. In the third version, a talk-show host (Chyra) is interviewing writer and international lecturer Costello, the author of The House on Eccles Street, a retelling of James Joyce’s Ulysses from the point of view of his wife, Molly Bloom. Then, suddenly, about halfway through, Costello/Huppert literally lets down her hair and goes into a gorgeous, albeit brief, monologue taken from Racine’s famous 1677 version of Phaedra that momentarily makes us forget everything that has come before — Kamilindi as a barking dog, Phaedra dragging herself across the floor while grunting, Torres Guerrero strutting around the stage seemingly looking for a pole, Phaedra dry heaving into a sink, Chyra exposing his buttocks again and again, the shower scene from Psycho repeating on a small monitor, Phaedra looking on as Theseus (Alex Descas) humps her masked corpse, and annoying Warholian projections by Denis Guéguin that are reflected in mirrors on Malgorzata Szczesniak’s strange prison/locker room set, a mostly empty space save for a sink at the upper left, a shower head on the back wall, a vertical mirror in which part of the audience is visible (watching them sit openmouthed at the proceedings was somewhat interesting for a time), and a side room that occasionally slides out to the center. Those few minutes near the end reveal the heart of the story and let Huppert finally act as we know she can, and it’s probably the primary reason why the show received a wildly enthusiastic standing ovation from a crowd that was significantly smaller than it had been 210 minutes earlier.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: PHAEDRA(S)

Isabelle Huppert appears as multiple Phaedras in Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe production at BAM (photo courtesy of Odéon Théâtre De L’Europe)

PHÈDRE(S)
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
September 13-18, $30-$95
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

In 2005, French superstar Isabelle Huppert was devastating in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychose, part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival. Four years later she returned to the festival in Robert Wilson’s Quartett, a wild adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses for Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe. Huppert and Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe are now back at BAM with Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Phaedra(s), a two-hundred-minute production in which the award-winning Huppert (La Cérémonie, The Piano Teacher) plays three versions of the title character from Greek mythology, taken from Kane’s Phaedra’s Love and writings by Wajdi Mouawad and J. M. Coetzee. Huppert and Warlikowski previously worked together in 2004 on The Dybbuk and 2010 in A Streetcar Named Desire. The dramaturgy is by Piotr Gruszczynski, with sets and costumes by Malgorzata Szczesniak, lighting by Felice Ross, music by Pawel Mykietyn, video by Denis Guéguin, and choreography by Claude Bardouil and Rosalba Torres Guerrero. The show runs September 13-18; in addition, Huppert will participate in a discussion about Phaedra(s) with Simon Critchley on September 17 at the Hillman Attic Studio ($25, 5:00), and Charles Mee, Caridad Svich, and moderator Kaneza Schaal will gather for “Phaedra Interpreted” on September 18 (free, 11:00 am) at Borough Hall Courtroom as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival, in conjunction with BAM and the Onassis Cultural Center New York.

TICKET ALERT: BAM 2016 NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL

Mikhail Baryshnikov channels Nijinsky in Robert Wilson’s LETTER TO A MAN (photo by Lucie Jansch)

Who: Performers and/or creators Mikhail Baryshnikov, Isabelle Huppert, Ivo van Hove, Robert Wilson, Peter Brook, John Jasperse, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Alarm Will Sound, Howard Fishman, David Lang, Jonah Bokaer, Daniel Arsham, TR Warszawa, Cheek by Jowl, the Magnetic Fields, So Percussion, Wordless Music Orchestra, Shen Wei Dance Arts, Kyle Abraham / Abraham.In.Motion, Faye Driscoll, Mark Morris Dance Group, and many more
What: Annual fall interdisciplinary performance festival
Where: BAM Harvey Theater (651 Fulton St.), BAM Howard Gilman Opera House (30 Lafayette Ave.), BAM Fisher (321 Ashland Pl.)
When: September 7 – December 3
Why: Tickets for BAM’s 2016 Next Wave Festival have just gone on sale to the general public, but you better hurry if you want to see some of the hottest shows of what is always a great collection of innovative dance, music, film, theater, and hard-to-describe hybrid presentations from around the world. This year there are more than five dozen events, including performances, talks, and master classes. We don’t know about you, but we’ll be practically living at BAM this fall. Below are five of our don’t miss favorites.

Isabelle Huppert stars as a modern-day mythical queen in PHAEDRA(S) (photo by Pascal Victor/ArtComArt)

PHAEDRA(S)
BAM Harvey Theater
September 13-18, $30-$95
Isabelle Huppert is back at BAM, following her stunning turns in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis in 2005 and Robert Wilson’s Quartett in 2009. This time she stars as the mythological queen in Phaedra(s), in which director Krzysztof Warlikowski and Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe incorporate texts by Kane, Wajdi Mouawad, and J. M. Coetzee to tell the three-and-a-half-hour story of love and tragedy. On September 18, BAM will host the related panel discussion “Phaedra Interpreted” at Borough Hall as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival.

REMAINS
BAM Harvey Theater
September 21-24, $20-$45
John Jasperse, who presented the exhilarating Canyon at BAM in 2011, now looks back at his thirty-year career as well as toward the future in Remains, featuring dancers Maggie Cloud, Marc Crousillat, Burr Johnson, Heather Lang, Stuart Singer, and Claire Westby and music by John King. On September 22 at 2:00 ($30), Jasperse will teach a master class for intermediate to professional dancers at the Mark Morris Dance Center, and on September 23 at 6:00 ($25) he will participate in a talk with Tere O’Connor at BAM Fisher.

LETTER TO A MAN
BAM Harvey Theater
October 15-30, $35-$120
BAM regular Robert Wilson reteams with Mikhail Baryshnikov in this multimedia staging of the diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky; the two collaborated at BAM in 2014 with The Old Woman. Baryshnikov recently paid tribute to his friend Joseph Brodsky in Brodsky/Baryshnikov, while Wilson has presented such aural and visual spectacles at BAM as Quartett, The Black Rider, and Woyzeck. On October 24 at 7:00 at NYU’s Center for Ballet and the Arts, “Inside Nijinsky’s Diaries” will consist of an actor reading from the diaries, followed by a discussion (free with advance RSVP).

Ivo van Hove merges multiple Shakespeare plays into KINGS OF WAR (photo by Jan Versweyveld)

KINGS OF WAR
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
November 3-6, $24-$130
In-demand director Ivo van Hove and Toneelgroep Amsterdam return to BAM for a four-and-a-half-hour adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V, Henry VI Parts I, II & III, and Richard III. Van Hove has previously staged such works as Angels in America, Cries and Whispers, and Antigone (with Juliette Binoche) at BAM, in addition to the double shot of A View from the Bridge and The Crucible on Broadway.

THANK YOU FOR COMING: PLAY
BAM Fisher
Judith and Alan Fishman Space
November 16-19, $25
Choreographer Faye Driscoll follows up Thank You for Coming: Attendance with this new work, which we got a sneak peek at this past weekend on Governors Island. Driscoll’s presentations (There is so much mad in me, 837 Venice Blvd.) are always involving and unpredictable, and this piece is no exception. Driscoll will also be teaching a master class on November 18 at 2:00 ($30) for performers at all levels.

DanceAfrica — SENEGAL: DOORS OF ANCIENT FUTURES

WAATO SiiTA will be celebrating its native Senegal at DanceAfrica at BAM this weekend (photo courtesy of the artist)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, BAMcafé, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
May 27-30, free – $60
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

For its thirty-ninth season, BAM’s extraordinary DanceAfrica program takes audiences to Senegal, celebrating “Doors of Ancient Futures.” The Memorial Day weekend festivities, under the leadership of new artistic director Abdel R. Salaam (from Forces of Nature) and beloved artistic director emeritus Chuck Davis, feature performances in the Howard Gilman Opera House by the Senegalese troupes Les Ballets de la Renaissance Africaine “WAATO SiiTA” and Compagnie Tenane, Senegalese legend Germaine Acogny (“the Mother of Contemporary African Dance”), and Brooklyn’s own BAM/Restoration DanceAfrica Ensemble, joined by Forces of Nature founding member Dyane Harvey-Salaam and Reverend Nafisa Sharriff. Be on the lookout for both traditional and contemporary movement, including krumping, popping, and breakdancing. There will also be a late-night dance party May 28 in the BAMcafé with DJ Tony Humphries, workshops on May 30 with WAATO SiiTA choreographer Pape Moussa Sonko, a FilmAfrica series consisting of ten films screening in BAM Rose Cinemas (including Nicolas Cissé’s Le Terreau de L’Espoir, Yared Zeleke’s Lamb, and Jason Silverman and Samba Gadjigo’s Sembene!), and the oh-so-fab outdoor DanceAfrica Bazaar (May 28-30), chock-full of vendors selling African products, from clothing and music to jewelry and food.

THE JUDAS KISS

Oscar Wilde (Rupert Everett) contemplates what might be his last night of freedom in THE JUDAS KISS (photo by Richard Termine)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 12, $30-$125
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

David Hare’s The Judas Kiss is a tale of two plays in more ways than one. The inaugural production in 1998 in London and on Broadway, starring Liam Neeson as Oscar Wilde, was such a critical flop that even Hare (Plenty, Skylight) himself admitted it was a failure. However, seeking to gain support for a film he wrote about Wilde, English actor Rupert Everett helped mount a 2012 revival of The Judas Kiss that has been garnering significantly better reviews as it tours the UK and Canada and has now settled in for a one-month run at the BAM Harvey through June 12. Everett (My Best Friend’s Wedding, An Ideal Husband) is triumphant as Wilde, but the disconnect between the first and second acts still prevents the play from being a complete success. (Interestingly, Hare made no changes to the script for this revival.) The Judas Kiss opens on April 5, 1895, at the Cadogan Hotel, as the staff, randy hotel employees Arthur Wellesley (Elliot Balchin) and Phoebe Cane (Jessie Hills) under the guidance of the staid and proper valet Sandy Moffat (Alister Cameron), prepares for the arrival of Wilde, who is being tried for “acts of gross indecency” by the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas (Charlie Rowe), affectionately known as Bosie. Wilde’s manager and former lover, Robert Ross (Cal MacAninch) soon arrives and the conflict is set in motion: Ross wants Wilde to leave England immediately in order to escape prosecution, while Bosie wants him to stay and fight the charges, as a way for the young lad to stand up to his father. “It appears that the whole of London is fleeing. I looked from my coach. Every invert in the metropolitan area is now packing his bags and heading for France,” Wilde says. “It is a veritable mass migration. I’d never imagined diaspora could be on this scale. The takings at certain fashionable restaurants will tonight be counted in pennies. At a single stroke, the opera will be stone-dead as an art form.” But before choosing his course of action, Wilde explains what is most important. “Let us be realistic. In the name of our common humanity, let us get our priorities straight. Let us pause, let us make the seminal decision: it seems that I still have time for my lunch.” Slapstick comedy mixes with graver matters of freedom and love as Ross and Bosie argue over Wilde’s fate and a phalanx of reporters attempts to storm the hotel. Through it all, Wilde is both witty and effete, courteous and haughty, but time is clearly running out on him, as evidenced by the clock in the room, which has no hands.

Bosie (Charlie Rowe) and Oscar Wilde (Rupert Everett) face some harsh realities in David Hare revival at BAM (photo by Richard Termine)

The second act is dreary and dour, set two years later in a ramshackle hotel in Naples. Recently released from Reading Gaol, Wilde looks decades older, barely able to move out of his chair. He is joined by Bosie and Bosie’s latest lover, local fisherman Galileo Masconi (Tom Colley), who casually walks around completely naked before sitting on the floor and eating a sugared bun still au naturel. “Oh, it’s wonderful, it’s like a child, isn’t it?” Wilde says, staring lustily at Galileo. “Who said one can never go back? If only I could go back to that! If I ever was like that! Like an animal, like a cat. Truly, one should throw him a ball of string. Look at the little fellow.” But there is no going back for Wilde, now a sad, nearly penniless recluse, wasting away in Italy. “There is no morality in what is called morality; there is no sense in what is called sense; and least of all is there meaning in what is held to be meaning,” he tells Bosie. Director Neil Armfield (Diary of a Madman, Exit the King) can’t quite find the right balance between the engaging first act and the more stationary second act, relying too much on Everett’s towering presence even as he shrinks away. But Everett’s performance makes this Judas Kiss more than worthy; he plays the role with relish and panache, breathing exciting life into a familiar figure, bringing humanity to an often caricatured personality. (In preparing for the role, he even slept in Wilde’s old room at the Cadogan.) You can’t take your eyes off him, whether he’s enjoying champagne and lobster, trapped in his chair, or seen in an enveloping shadow on the wall. (The lighting is by Rick Fisher, sets by Dale Ferguson.) Alan John’s soundtrack is relatively unnecessary; at times it was so soft and distant that it appeared to be a cell phone going off in the audience. But the play remains as relevant as ever, with the continuing controversies and bullying over gay marriage and LGBTQ discrimination. “Just a century ago a man — Oscar — could be imprisoned and ruined — killed off, basically — simply for being gay,” Everett wrote in a recent column for the New York Times, referring to the legalization of same-sex marriage in England. “But tonight a homosexual stood on equal ground with the rest of society, and I was, quite unexpectedly, extremely moved.” So it’s a genuine treat to have Wilde, in the personage of Everett, back at BAM, where, in 1882 in the institution’s original home on Montague St., Wilde spoke as part of his North American lecture tour.