Tag Archives: howard gilman opera house

VENEZUELA

Batsheva’s Venezuela dances into BAM this week (photo by Asca)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
March 27-30, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
batsheva.co.il/en

Superstar Israeli troupe Batsheva Dance Company is back at BAM this week with Ohad Naharin’s Venezuela, running March 27-30 at the Howard Gilman Opera House. The evening-length work consists of two forty-minute sections that mirror each other movement-wise but change the score, which ranges from Gregorian chants to songs by Rage Against the Machine, Olafur Arnalds, the Notorious B.I.G., and Vox. Under Naharin’s leadership, Batsheva has been presenting dance at BAM for many years, including The Last Work, Hora, and Sadeh21; this will be the main troupe’s first visit since former company dancer Gili Navot took over as artistic director, with Naharin remaining as house choreographer to develop new pieces and continue his research into his unique Gaga language. Venezuela, which addresses freedom of choice and has been percolating in Naharin for decades, is performed by Etay Axelroad, Billy Barry, Yael Ben Ezer, Matan Cohen, Ben Green, Chiaki Horita, Chunwoong Kim, Rani Lebzelter, Hugo Marmelada, Eri Nakamura, Nitzan Ressler, Kyle Scheurich, Maayan Sheinfeld, Yoni (Yonatan) Simon, Hani Sirkis, Amalia Smith, Imre van Opstal, and Erez Zohar, with lighting by Avi Yona Bueno (Bambi), soundtrack design and edit by Maxim Waratt, and costumes by Nakamura. On March 29 at 10:30 am at the Mark Morris Dance Center, a Batsheva company member will lead a Gaga and Repertory master class for professionals ($25).

LAST WORK

Batsheva Dance Company perform exhilarating LAST WORK at BAM through February 4 (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
February 1-4, $25-$65, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.batsheva.co.il

There’s no need to worry about the title of Ohad Naharin’s latest piece for Batsheva Dance Company; he’s been considering the title Last Work for eight or nine of his previous efforts, merely representing that it’s the latest, not a career-ending finale. And that’s a very good thing, because Last Work, continuing at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House through February 4, shows the kibbutz-born Israeli choreographer, who since 1990 has led Batsheva — founded in 1964 by Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild, with Martha Graham as its first artistic adviser — still at the top of his game. For sixty-five minutes, seventeen members of the immensely talented Tel Aviv-based troupe speak to the audience in Naharin’s unique Gaga movement language, employing gesticulations and motion that emphasize body parts, animal instincts, pleasure, freedom, and imagination. “We are turning on the volume of listening to our body, we appreciate small gestures, we are measuring and playing with the texture of our flesh and skin, we might be silly, we can laugh at ourselves,” Naharin explains about Gaga, and Last Work features all that and more. The curtain rises to reveal a woman in a blue dress and sneakers running in place at the back of the stage, seemingly suspended in air. The dancers wear different-colored shorts and tops at the start, changing into dark outfits and, later, off-white undergarments, designed by dancer Eri Nakamura (Naharin’s wife), melding well with Avi Yona Bueno’s (Bambi) lighting.

Batsheva Dance Company reach out and touch one another in LAST WORK (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Memorable moments abound, including all the dancers placing their hands over one standing man’s body, the company wriggling across the floor on their butts, individual solos with sharp, angular movements of knees and elbows, an emotional pas de deux by Bret Easterling and Zina (Natalya) Zinchenko (the latter in a tutu), and two women slowly reaching their hands out as they tilt back their heads in yearning, all set to Grischa Lichtenberger’s score, which ranges from electronic music to Romanian lullabies. (Three words Naharin, who has a young daughter with Nakamura, told his company to consider when formulating the piece were “baby,” “ballerina,” and “executioner.”) Although there is no specific narrative thread through most of Last Work, it concludes with a series of surprise props that make ambiguous, and funny, political references; Naharin, who was previously at BAM with 2014’s Sadeh21, 2012’s Hora, and 2007’s Three, has been outspoken in his support of peace between Israel and the Palestinians, resulting in protests against Batsheva from both sides because he refuses to denounce either. And then packing tape brings everyone and everything together, even the runner, who has not stopped for a second. Last Work is another exhilarating triumph from one of the world’s most inventive, entertaining, and influential choreographers. (For more on Naharin and Batsheva, you can check out Tomer Heymann’s new documentary, Mr. Gaga, at Film Forum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, with several screenings followed by Q&As and demonstrations.)

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: THE TREE OF LIFE WITH LIVE MUSIC

Wordless Music Orchestra will perform new score to Terence Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE at BAM

THE TREE OF LIFE (Terrence Malick, 2005)
BAMcinématek, Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
November 18-19, $35-$85, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/thetreeoflife
www.twowaysthroughlife.com

Iconoclastic writer-director Terrence Malick had made only five feature films in his forty-plus-year career when The Tree of Life came out in 2011, and it might very well be his best. And now you can see it like never before, as the BAM Next Wave Festival presents it in the Howard Gilman Opera House with a live score performed by more than one hundred singers and musicians from New York City’s Wordless Music Orchestra playing works by Mahler, Berlioz, Brahms, Górecki, Mozart, Tavener, Smetana, Couperin, and others, conducted by Ryan McAdams and featuring Robert Fleitz on piano and sopranos Charles Love and Jennifer Zetlan. Following Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005), The Tree of Life is an epic masterpiece of massive proportions, a stirring visual journey into the beginning of the universe, the end of the world, and beyond. The unconventional nonlinear narrative essentially tells the story of a middle-class Texas family having a difficult time coming to grips with the death of one of their sons in the military. Malick cuts between long flashbacks of Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) in the 1950s and 1960s, as they meet, marry, and raise their three boys, to the present, when Jack (Sean Penn), their eldest, now a successful architect, is still searching for answers. The sets by production designer Jack Fisk transport viewers from midcentury suburbia to the modern-day big city and a heavenly beach, all gorgeously shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Every frame is so beautiful, it’s as if they filmed the movie only at sunrise and sunset, the Golden Hour, when the light is at its most pure. The Tree of Life is about God and not God, about faith and belief, about evolution and creationism, about religion and the scientific world. The film opens with a quote from the Book of Job: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation . . . while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” Early on, Mrs. O’Brien says in voice-over, “The nuns taught us there are two ways through life: The way of nature, and the way of grace. You have to choose which one to follow.” Malick leaves those questions open, displaying the miracles of life and death and everything in between as perhaps the only response.

Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, and Brad Pitt star in Terrence Malick’s epic masterpiece, THE TREE OF LIFE

With the help of Douglas Trumbull, the special effects legend behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind — and who hadn’t been involved in a Hollywood film in some thirty years — Malick travels through time and space, using almost no CGI. Instead, he employs images from the Hubble telescope along with Thomas Wilfred’s flickering “Opus 161” art installation, which evokes a kind of eternal flame that appears in between the film’s various sections. Malick rolls the Big Bang, dinosaurs, and the planets into this inner and outer head trip of a movie that will leave you breathless with anticipation at where he is going to take you next — and where he goes is never where expected, originally accompanied by Alexandre Desplat’s ethereal orchestral score, which has been completely replaced for these screenings. But perhaps more than anything else, The Tree of Life, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for three Oscars (for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Cinematography), is about the act of creation, from the creation of the universe and the world to the miracle of procreation (and the creation of cinema itself). Mr. O’Brien is an inventor who continually seeks out patents but always wanted to be a musician; he plays the organ in church, but his dream of creating his own symphony has long been dashed. And Jack is an architect, a man who creates and builds large structures but is unable to get his own life in order. In creating The Tree of Life, Malick has torn down convention, coming up with something fresh and new, something that combines powerful human emotions with visual wizardry, a multimedia poem about life and death, the alpha and the omega. And now you can hear it in a different way as well as this special performance makes its U.S. premiere at BAM’s grand opera house.

BESSIE AWARDS 2016

Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson’s CHAMBRE is nominated for a Bessie Award for Outstanding Production (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Tuesday, October 18, $20-$30, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bessies.org
www.bam.org

The thirty-second annual Bessie Awards are returning to their early home at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, where on October 18 they will celebrate the best in dance. Since 1984, the awards, named after dancer, choreographer, and teacher Bessie Schönberg, who passed away in 1997 at the age of ninety, have honored such performers, designers, composers, and choreographers as Pina Bausch, Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown, Paul Taylor, Wendy Whelan, Martin Puryear, Annie-B Parson, Mark Morris, Faye Driscoll, Nari Ward, Ohad Naharin, Alexei Ratamansky, Movement Research, John Jasperse, and Linda Celeste Sims. Among this year’s nominees are Nicholas Bruder, Molly Lieber, Aaron Mattocks, Gillian Murphy, and Jamar Roberts for Outstanding Performer, Ralph Lemon, Eamonn Farrell, Holly Batt, and DD Dorvillier and Thomas Dunn for Outstanding Visual Design, and Admanda Kobilka and Ustatshakirt Plus for Outstanding Music Composition / Sound Design. The twelve nominees for Outstanding Production include Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson’s Chambre, Maria Hassabi’s PLASTIC, Heather Kravas’s dead, disappears, Lemon’s Scaffold Room, and Justin Peck’s Heatscape, in addition to works by luciana achugar, Souleymane Badolo, Camille A. Brown, Pat Graney, Dada Masilo, Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard, and Safi A. Thomas with H+ | the Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory.

Maraia Hassabi’s site-specific MoMA presentation PLASTIC is competing for Outstanding Production at the 2016 Bessie Awards (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The Dayton Contemporary Dance Company’s presentation of Donald McKayle’s Rainbow ’Round My Shoulder has already been named Outstanding Revived Work, with Joya Powell grabbing the coveted Outstanding Emerging Choreographer award; the October 18 show, hosted by Adrienne Truscott, will feature performances by those winners as well as an all-star tap tribute to Lifetime Achievement in Dance awardee Brenda Bufalino. In addition, Pam Tanowitz won the Juried Bessie Award, and Outstanding Service to the Field went to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and Thelma Hill Performing Arts Center executive chairman Alex Smith; Eiko Otake will receive a Special Bessie Award from Meredith Monk. Other presenters include Ayodele Casel, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Judy Hussie-Taylor, Judith Jamison, Alastair Macaulay, and Alice Sheppard. The show will be preceded by the Bessie Awards Angel Party at the Mark Morris Dance Center ($100-$6,000), honoring Marilynn Donini, Stephanie French, Karen Brosius, and Jennifer Goodale, and will be followed by a free dance party at BRIC with complimentary pizza from Two Boots.

MIRANDA JULY IN CONVERSATION WITH HOST LENA DUNHAM

Miranda July will discuss her latest book, THE FIRST BAD MAN, with Lena Dunham at BAM on January 28

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
Wednesday, January 28, $35-$50
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

“Miranda July’s ability to pervert norms while embracing what makes us normal is astounding,” Girls creator Lena Dunham says of Miranda July’s debut novel, The First Bad Man (Scribner, January 2015, $25). “Writing in the first person with the frank, odd lilt of an utterly truthful character, she will make you laugh, cringe, and recognize yourself in a woman you never planned to be. By the time July tackles motherhood, the book has become a bible. Never has a novel spoken so deeply to my sexuality, my spirituality, my secret self. I know I am not alone.” On January 28, Dunham, who wrote, directed, and starred in the indie hit Tiny Furniture and whose memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, was released this past September, will host an evening of conversation with July, an influential multimedia artist who writes, directs, and stars in her own films (Me and You and Everyone We Know, The Future), writes short stories (many of her earlier ones have been collected in No One Belongs Here More Than You), has recorded albums (10 Million Hours a Mile, The Binet-Simon Test), developed the personal messaging app “Somebody,” and makes performance pieces and art installations (“Eleven Heavy Things,” “Things We Don’t Understand and Definitely Are Not Going to Talk About”).

Lena Dunham will be at BAM to host a conversation with Miranda July (photo by Autumn de Wilde)

Lena Dunham will host what should be a kooky conversation with Miranda July at BAM (photo by Autumn de Wilde)

In her first book since 2011’s It Chooses You (a companion piece to The Future), July introduces the world to one Cheryl Glickman, a rather persnickety, peculiar, strangely punctilious woman who lives her life and interprets situations a bit oddly. When her carefully laid out existence is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of her bosses’ troubled daughter, Clee, who will be staying with her for an indeterminate amount of time, Cheryl is forced to reevaluate her needs and her “funny way of doing things,” as Clee says. Cheryl suffers from globus hystericus, has a bizarre relationship with her therapist, pines away for an older member of the board of directors where she works, and is constantly in search of Kubelko Bondy, a “baby I think of as mine.” An eccentric both inside and out, Cheryl and her exploits are endlessly charming and plentifully weird as she deals with sexuality, femininity, class, age, and family. And just when you think you might have her figured out, she does yet another thing that surprises, delights, and confounds you. In reviewing No One Belongs Here More Than You, we wrote, “July’s characters live in their own alternate, warped realities, constantly confusing their relationships with friends, family, and even strangers, mistaking nothings for somethings,” a statement that suits The First Bad Man to a tee. The book even has a cool, chic design, courtesy of July’s husband, artist and filmmaker Mike Mills (Thumbsucker, Beginners); the dust jacket and case are all black, the title and author name in plain white sans serif type, but the endpapers are like a groovy psychedelic abstract painting. Seeing July, who was born in Vermont and raised in Berkeley, and Dunham, a New York City native, together at BAM should be endlessly charming and plentifully weird as well, making for one very entertaining evening. We’re hoping for a warped, brilliant view directly into two very particular expressions of contemporary female creative sensibility — and one very kooky discussion.

DANCEAFRICA 2013

The Bronx-based Harambee Dance Company is part of 2013 DanceAfrica festival at BAM (photo by Derrek Garret)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
May 24-27, free – $50
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Last week, the incomparable Baba Chuck Davis, the founder and artistic director of BAM’s annual DanceAfrica festival, was one of the grand marshals of the seventh New York Dance Parade, the theme of which was “Unity Through Dance.” That same theme can apply to Davis and DanceAfrica, which this year brings three international companies to the Howard Gilman Opera House stage. Zimbabwe’s Umkhathi Theatre Works will perform the tribal dance Isitshikitsha, the hunting-and-gathering dance Chinyambera, the Shangani tribal dance Muchongoyo, and the social gathering Setapa, joined by the BAM/Restoration DanceAfrica Ensemble. Atlanta’s Giwayen Mata’s program will include Perseverance: In My House, set to DJ Fresca’s “Amaphoyisa,” and the Lamban Dansa. Harambee Dance Company, which hails from the Bronx, will present the historical and spiritual journey Reflections, the partying Midnight in the City, and the musical piece “You Goin’ Get This Work.” As a special treat, Washington, DC’s Sweet Honey in the Rock will sing “Sabumoya,” “I Remember I Believe,” “Wholly Wholly,” and “Let There Be Peace.” As always, Davis will provide his welcoming address (“Ago!” “Amée!!”), introduce the Council of Elders, and honor those who are no longer with us. Meanwhile, BAMcinématek’s FilmAfrica will screen such movies as Taghreed Elsanhouri’s Our Beloved Sudan, Clemente Bococchi’s Black Africa White Marble, Charlie Vundla’s How to Steal 2 Million, and Rémi Bezançon and Jean-Christophe Lie’s animated Zarafa. BAMcafé Live continues the African celebration with a pair of free concerts: Abdou Mboup and Waakaw on May 24 and a Late Night Dance Party with Ralph McDaniels and Video Music Box on May 25. And the always fun DanceAfrica Bazaar will set up shop along Lafayette Ave. and Ashland Pl. Saturday through Monday, a global marketplace with great food, clothing, fashion, arts & crafts, and much more.

NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: RHINOCEROS

Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, will present Eugène Ionesco’s classic absurdist tale RHINOCÉROS this week at BAM (photo by Jean-Louis Fernandez)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
October 4-6
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.theatredelaville-paris.com

As much as Jean-Paul Sartre is associated with the idea of existentialism, playwright Eugène Ionesco is linked with the word absurd. Born in Romania in 1909 and raised primarily in France, Ionesco changed the face of dramatic narrative with such works as The Lesson, The Chairs, The Killer, and Exit the King. One of his most famous plays, 1959’s Rhinocéros, which was turned into a 1973 film starring Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, and Karen Black, can now be seen in an inventive adaptation by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota and Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, running at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House October 4-6 as part of the thirtieth Next Wave Festival. “I like to come back to playwrights who question the place and role of the individual in collective history, on his responsibility, his freedom of thought, beyond any form of individualism,” Demarcy-Mota, who has also recently directed works by Horváth and Brecht, explains on the company website. The allegory about totalitarianism features set and lighting by Yves Collet, music by Jefferson Lembeye, and costumes by Corinne Baudelot, with François Regnault serving as artistic collaborator; Serge Maggiani plays Bérenger, Hugues Quester is Jean, and Valérie Dashwood takes on the role of Daisy. “”Ionesco knows how to depict dialectically every man’s cowardice, conformism and hypocrisy,” Demarcy-Mota adds. Rhinocéros “is a funereally burlesque play that we wish to render with full energy.” As a bonus, on October 5 at 5:00 at the Rosenthal Pavilion at NYU’s Kimmel Center, the esteemed panel of Demarcy-Mota, Edward Albee, Israel Horovitz, and Marie-France Ionesco will participate in the free “Next Wave Talk: On Ionesco,” moderated by NYU French literature professor Tom Bishop.

Nowhere is safe in Théâtre de la Ville’s thrilling production of Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist classic (photo by Pavel Antonov)

Update: Théâtre de la Ville director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota promised a Rhinocéros rendered “with full energy,” and he and the company deliver all that and more in their engaging version of Eugène Ionesco’s 1959 absurdist classic, running October 4-6 at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House as part of the thirtieth Next Wave Festival. Following a short introductory excerpt from Ionesco’s sole novel, The Hermit, the curtain opens on a group of people in a town square just going about their daily business. Jean (a big, blustery Hugues Quester) bikes in to meet his friend Bérenger (Serge Maggiani), a bedraggled man recovering from a hangover, not able to remember much of what occurred the night before. A rhinoceros suddenly roars through the town like a tsunami, leaving in its wake a stunned crowd not quite sure what it really just saw, instead getting caught up in existential discussions of cats’ paws. Eventually life goes on, with Bérenger, who has a crush on Daisy (Valérie Dashwood), arriving at the publishing house where he works, only to encounter another stampeding rhino. As everyone around him starts turning into rhinos, the hapless Bérenger is determined not to succumb to the mass hysteria. Featuring terrific staging (courtesy of Yves Collet) that includes a raised-level office, collapsing rooms, and a majestically morphing figure in addition to a slowly building score by Jefferson Lembeye that nearly explodes at the end, Théâtre de la Ville’s Rhinocéros cleverly captures the philosophical underpinnings of Ionesco’s tale of the fight for individualism in the face of growing totalitarianism and an ever-increasing conformity that is overwhelming a consumer-driven society. Evoking Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis, Don Siegel’s sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and such recent disasters as Hurricane Katrina and the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the show combines humor, pathos, and playful investigations of logic as the community is overcome by a collective consciousness that seems unstoppable. Ionesco might have written Rhinocéros because of what he saw occurring in Eastern Europe in the 1930s, but it still feels as fresh and relevant as ever in this outstanding production.