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Since its debut in 1983, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s annual Next Wave Festival has become New York City’s foremost showcase of theater, music, and dance that is . . . what do we call it these days? Once upon a time, we might have called it "avant-garde," meaning ahead of its time. Nowadays the term "avant-garde" seems passé, meaningless, even pretentious. New Yorkers are savvy cultural consumers. With advanced telecommunications and high-speed Internet access, word travels fast, and new becomes old faster than ever.
So forget "avant-garde." Let’s just say the Next Wave Festival reliably focuses on contemporary live performance that is more adventurous and innovative than most of the work that’s seen in mainstream theaters and concert halls, not to mention in the mass media. In the two decades since it first appeared, "Next Wave" has more or less become its own genre, and the festival has created a crossroads where imaginative artists and audiences encounter one another.
The lineup of events for the 20th manifestation of the Next Wave Festival, which begins October 1 and runs through December 22, is a familiar mixture of established heavyweights and intriguing new faces. BAM’s executive producer Joseph V. Melillo, who planned the very first Next Wave Festival, used the metaphor of tectonic plates to indicate the layers of meaning and intention reflected in this year’s program. The top layer had to do with paying tribute to the master artists who form a kind of Next Wave Honor Roll.
"There’s a group of American artists for whom the Next Wave Festival was created originally who happen to be creating mature work," Melillo said in a recent interview. "I wanted this festival to be their celebration. I wanted to take a moment and, to quote Arthur Miller, say: Attention must be paid to these artists. Look at what Philip Glass is doing, what Meredith Monk is doing, what Steve Reich is doing, what Robert Wilson is doing."
Glass, the renowned composer who started the Next Wave Festival with
The Photographer/Far from the Truth, will open this year’s series with
Galileo Galilei (Oct. 1 & 3-5), a new opera directed by Mary Zimmerman, who brought ancient myths to Broadway last season in the hit show
Metamorphoses. Monk, a multimedia performer and creator who collaborated with theater artist Ping Chong on
The Games at BAM in 1984, returns this year with mercy (Dec. 3-7), for which her artistic partner was installation artist Ann Hamilton. Reich, whose long history with BAM included the 1984 premiere of the large-scale symphonic and choral piece
The Desert Music, is back with Three Tales (Oct. 16 & 18-19), a digital documentary-video opera about air travel, atomic bomb testing, and cloning co-created with video artist Beryl Korot. And theater visionary Robert Wilson, whose landmark 1976 production of Glass’s
Einstein on the Beach was reconstructed at BAM in 1984, brings in his musical version of
Woyzeck (Oct. 29-Nov. 16), Georg Büchner’s stark drama about a decent man driven to commit murder in a morally bankrupt society. The production, commissioned and performed by Copenhagen’s Betty Nansen Theatre, features a score by Tom Waits (who also wrote the music for Wilson’s
The Black Rider and Alice) and Kathleen Brennan.
"These were the artists," said Melillo, "to whom BAM had turned over its large venues in those early years in the 1980s. At that time, it was experimental work. They had lots of ideas and lots of energy. Today, 20 years later, New York City is going to be able to see the work of masters who have honed their crafts."
In addition to providing a haven for the above-mentioned four artists, he said, "Everything about this year’s roster relates to a core value of the Next Wave Festival at BAM. We’ve always been a place where performing artists and visual artists have collaborated, the way Meredith is doing with Ann Hamilton. We are a place where music-theater of a certain brand -- such as Robert Wilson’s pieces with Tom Waits -- has been presented consistently. So have experiments in technology and new media, like Steve Reich’s work with Beryl Korot. And essential to the festival is balancing American work with that of international artists. This season our dance offerings include Grupo Corpo from Brazil, Sasha Waltz from Germany, Angelin Preljocaj from France, and Sankai Juku from Japan, so you get a sense of the global playing field. That’s the spine of the Next Wave Festival."
Alongside the business-as-usual aspects of the festival, there emerges a particular thread this year of Big Stories from myth, history, and literature. In addition to the classic stories of Galileo and Woyzeck, Yukio Minagawa will present
Macbeth in Japanese (Dec. 4-7), and British director Deborah Warner will show her award-winning production of
Medea (Oct. 1-12), which originated at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and features her longtime collaborator Fiona Shaw in the title role. The festival also includes two different works based on Biblical accounts of the last days of Jesus Christ:
Water Passion After St. Matthew (Dec. 11 & 13-14) by Chinese-born composer Tan Dun, who wrote the Oscar-winning score for
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and La Pasión Según San
Marcos (Oct. 30 & Nov. 1-2), Jewish-Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov’s rendition of the Gospel according to St. Mark, performed by the Brooklyn Philharmonic.
"I don’t usually say this aloud, but I am dedicated to storytelling," said Melillo. "I believe that’s how all artists communicate. This year’s festival is more overt about taking great classic pieces of literature that have sustained the test of time and watching them be re-imagined by the non-traditional artists of our generation."
Another thematic strand apparent in this year’s festival is The Body. The dance performances in particular explore this theme. In addition to its 1992 milestone piece
21, Brazil’s Grupo Corpo will perform a work created to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the company in 2000 called
O Corpo -- Portuguese for The Body (Oct. 22 & 24-26). "This mass formed by bones, flesh, blood, organs, muscles, nerves, nails and hair" serves as inspiration both for the choreography by Rodrigo Pederneiras and the score by Amaldo Atunes.
Likewise, Sasha Waltz, a highly regarded choreographer in Europe who recently assumed co-leadership of Berlin‘s prestigious Schaubuhne theater, will be making her New York debut with
Körper (Bodies) (Nov. 13 & 15-17). One review said of Waltz’s piece, "The body in
Körper is sometimes a mass, a heaving, undulating group slickly working through a mind-boggling complex dance; at other times the hypnotic
to-and- fro of slippery, sensual doublework explores the co-dependency of partnership. Then there is the body alone, exposed and vulnerable in the vast space of her theatre."
Clearly, in today’s world, we live in such a high-tech, disembodied culture that dancers more and more hold the place of
body- consciousness. This emphasis on the body, Melillo said, "is about beauty as well. You cast away everything and look at the form of the body in time and space. There is this phenomenon today of choreographers from all parts of the world getting fixated on the human body in their work. I didn’t go looking for it, I responded to it."
Stagebill, July/August 2002
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