Fifteen characters share their stories during a rave in CROWD (photo © Estelle_Hanania)

CROWD
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
October 13-15, $34-$85, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/crowd
www.g-v.fr/en/shows/crowd

Franco-Austrian choreographer, filmmaker, photographer, and installation artist Gisèle Vienne’s propulsive, euphoric CROWD makes its US premiere at BAM from October 13 to 15, with three highly anticipated performances in the Howard Gilman Opera House. A joint presentation of BAM’s Next Wave and FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festivals, the ninety-minute 2017 work, which has traveled from Tokyo, Rome, and Dublin to Stockholm, Singapore, and Sao Paulo, features fifteen performers whose dialogue-free stories emerge amid a time-jumping 1990s-style Detroit rave. Lucas Bassereau, Philip Berlin, Marine Chesnais, Sylvain Decloitre, Sophie Demeyer, Vincent Dupuy, Massimo Fusco, Rehin Hollant, Georges Labbat, Oskar Landström, Theo Livesey, Louise Perming, Katia Petrowick, Linn Ragnarsson, Jonathan Schatz, Henrietta Wallberg, and Tyra Wigg move around a filthy floor littered with dirt and detritus to music by Underground Resistance, KTL, Vapour Space, DJ Rolando, Drexciya, the Martian, and others; the sound design, edits, and playlist are by Peter Rehberg, with Stephen O’Malley the sound diffusion supervisor and lighting by Patrick Riou.

Inspired by her time dancing in clubs in early 1990s Berlin, creator, choreographer, and scenic designer Vienne (I Apologize, Kindertotenlieder, Jerk) developed the characters and narrative with longtime collaborator Dennis Cooper, the American poet and novelist who has written such books as the George Miles Cycle and was the founder and editor of the 1970s–’80s punk zine Little Caesar. “If you see CROWD live, audiences have said they feel a little bit different afterwards than before they came into the theatre, a slightly altered way of being,” Vienne told the UK Guardian in September 2019. “I think there is this double feeling of being very sharp — because it has slowed down, you can see detail in a sharper way than usual — and then a little bit of this stoned feeling.”