The Brooklyn Academy of Music, a New York institution more familiarly known as BAM, has gathered together every fall since 1981 what has become the biggest assemblage of avant-grade performing art in the United States. BAM is probably the most important presenter of nontraditional opera, dance, and music in the country today, despite its remote location across the East River in an unfashionable section of Brooklyn.
The Brooklyn Academy's neo-Renaissance building contains three theaters holding audiences ranging form six hundred to two thousand people, and this year the organization took over and reactivated an old movie house for the presentation of Peter Brook's marathon production of Mahabharata. BAM has thus been capable of presenting monumental works, as well as introducing emerging artists whose work originated in lofts and alternative spaces.
Resolutely Fashionable
BAM's audience, 80 percent under the age of forty, is resolutely trend-conscious, fashionable, and affluent, habitually looking like a page out of Details or Interview, and constantly in quest of the most innovative, unorthodox, and experimental in art forms. A not-for-profit institution, backed by subscriptions and memberships, federal, state, and city grants, as well as donations from major corporations and foundations--American Telephone and Telegraph, Philip Morris Companies, Inc., Rockefeller and Ford Foundations--BAM now runs in the black after a long period of being heavily in debt. Productions like the Mahabharata alone cost close to $2 million.
In the past, the Next Wave festival has offered such major works as Einstein on the Beach, an opera by director/designer Robert Wilson and composer Philip Glass, and such relatively minor ones as last year's performances by the Flying Karamozov Brothers, a comic jugglers act. The first Next Wave Festival was launched in 1981, basically in the hope of selling tickets at a time when BAM was deeply in debt. A Philip Glass opera, Satyagraha, about Mahatma Gandhi, in Sanskrit, and three avant-grade dance troupes--those of Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown, and Laura Dean--resulted in a sellout for the opera, and a much better-than-anticipated sale for the dance companies. The Next Wave Festival was under way.
The following season, performance artist Laurie Anderson put on a two-part multimedia spectacle, United States. Opening night found the likes of Jacqueline Onassis and Claus von Bülow in the audience. BAM organizers knew they were on the way to acceptance by the tiny elite that seems to guarantee bountiful media coverage in America today, and that many of their problems--above all, financial ones--were over.
This year's Next Wave Festival notably featured the Peter Brook nine-hour theatrical extravaganza, Mahabharata, an Indian saga presented in an old movie theater, the Majestic, carefully and at great expense rebuilt to resemble a crumbling, decrepit old theater. Press and television coverage was extensive and tickets were sold out early in the run, although few people who attended actually managed to sit through the full nine hours.
Variations on Biblical Themes
The dance events included companies from
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