Brooklyn’s creative odyssey returns to BAM in the fall with a dazzling array of groundbreaking work. Next Wave is a definitive haven for today’s most audacious and visionary artists, inviting them to re-define our theatrical spaces and unveil performances that are genre-busting, formally daring, and thought-provoking. It is a chance for audiences to come together and discover art capable of changing the way we look at—and live in—the world.
Broken Chord
Created by Gregory Maqoma and Thuthuka Sibisi
October 19-21, 2023
Harvey Theater at BAM Strong
Near the end of the 19th century, a group of South African singers embarked on a tour of the UK and the US under the stage name “The African (Native) Choir,” hoping to raise funds to build a school in the city of Kimberley. Though the tour was profitable (and even included an audience with Queen Victoria), proof of the Choir’s performances was thought forever lost—until glass plates of the singers emerged in 2014, 125 years later. The internationally acclaimed South African dancer and choreographer Gregory Maqoma revisits this forgotten moment in history to cathartic and uplifting effect in his BAM debut. Combining dance, song and storytelling, the piece vividly reimagines the tour using a chorus of 16 singers and a quartet of musicians, all led by Maqoma himself. As the choir confronts racism at every turn, Maqoma and co-creator Thuthuka Sibisi use prejudice as a creative engine for a theatrical experience that pulses with hard truths and infinite creativity.
Corps extrêmes
Part of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival in New York
Chaillot - Théâtre national de la Danse
Choreography by Rachid Ouramdane
October 27-29, 2023
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Choreographer Rachid Ouramdane comes to BAM for the first time with Corps extrêmes, his new gravity-defying piece of aerial dance. Athlete-performers traverse the stage together and alone, sometimes in ethereal white light, and sometimes while footage of death-defying outdoor activities is projected over them. As a study of the precipices of our world—both literal and figurative—this sweeping, meditative work invites us to find calmness in the space between earth and sky. It’s a piece of staggering scale and vision, a work of interior physicality seeking escape, miraculous for its ability to bring about a jolt of adrenaline and follow it up with an ebb of still quietude.
FOOD
Created and co-directed by Geoff Sobelle
November 2-18, 2023
BAM Fisher Fishman Space
Do you need what you eat? Do you eat what you need? Performer and theater artist Geoff Sobelle (HOME, The Object Lesson) hosts an intimate dinner party of smell, taste and touch. The audience gathers around a gargantuan banquet table for a culinary experience that is at once common and strange, human and surreal, universal and personal. Sobelle’s latest creation is an absurdist, immersive and rigorously designed meditation on how we eat, what’s in the soup and who pays the bill. A tour-de-force of audience manipulation, hallucinatory sleight-of-hand and physical comedy, FOOD asks us what missing link fell off the food chain to make us eat the way we do.
The Köln Concert
Music by Keith Jarrett and Joni Mitchell
By Trajal Harrell / Schauspielhaus Zürich Dance Ensemble
November 2-4, 2023
Harvey Theater at BAM Strong
Trajal Harrell has gained global recognition as a choreographer whose artistry is equally at home on an opera house stage or a ballroom floor. From New York’s avant-garde scene to his current home of Switzerland, Harrell has skillfully deconstructed the distinct dance styles of voguing, butoh, modern and postmodern dance, injecting them with his remarkable blend of humor and poignancy. Harrell’s latest dance piece is at once a continuation and reimagining of his practice, set to jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert. Making his BAM debut, Harrell performs alongside six members of his recently assembled Schauspielhaus Zürich Dance Ensemble, using his signature form of the catwalk. The precise movements and deep feeling of this international cast find fragility and tenderness in Jarrett’s canonical piece and the compositions of another musical genius: Joni Mitchell. Harrell, a powerhouse performer, begins the evening by dancing solo to signature songs by the iconic Canadian singer-songwriter. Mitchell’s music sets the stage for a transcendent, heart-stirring work.
adaku, part 1: the road opens
Created by Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born
November 28-December 2, 2023
BAM Fisher Fishman Space
With her resonant voice and formidable intensity, Okwui Okpokwasili creates dance theater that stirs the senses and vibrates the soul, rooted as much in the power and precision of speech as in movement. In collaboration with her longtime partner, the director Peter Born, Okpokwasili has bucked convention by embracing the impromptu, running fearlessly towards the unknown and establishing herself as “an expectation-confounding blend of authority and vulnerability” (The New York Times). adaku, part 1: the road opens finds Okpokwasili and Born stepping into a new stage of their shared practice, crafting a thrumming, richly textured sonic and visual landscape. In this inaugural chapter of a larger speculative mythology, a precolonial African village stands at the cusp of a major upheaval as its community wrestles with a conflict that could alter the futures of all of its members. Okpokwasili and the ensemble enact a collective reckoning that explores the role of ritual and the fraught relationship between ancestors and future generations, facilitating an intimate exchange between the performers and the audience.
HOW TO LIVE (after you die)
Written, directed and performed by Lynette Wallworth
December 7-9, 2023
BAM Fisher Fishman Space
Lynette Wallworth spent her early adulthood like any average person—acting as a Bible-interpreting prophetess in a radical Pentecostal community in Sydney. In her BAM debut, the Emmy Award-winning Australian artist deftly shifts her work from film to stage to share an incisive and deeply engrossing morality tale for our times—one in which she just happens to be the protagonist. Using her medium-traversing works as touchstones, Wallworth sheds light on the seduction of cultish extremism by recounting her own descent into an exclusionary, mind-warping belief system and her eventual escape through art. Giving voice to experiences she never intended to share, Wallworth confronts and responds with bold, bracing candor to the troubling rise of implausible conspiracy theories and the toxic alliance that sometimes emerges between the extreme edges of organized religion and fascist forces. HOW TO LIVE (after you die) finds a master storyteller at the peak of her powers, pointing to the ways in which fanaticism can hold the imagination captive, unless we find the courage to reclaim the creation of our own life and story.
BAM and Prototype Festival present
Angel Island
Composed by Huang Ruo
Directed by Matthew Ozawa
Film by Bill Morrison
January 11-13, 2024
Harvey Theater at BAM Strong
Starting in 1910, many immigrants who journeyed to America were processed at an immigration station on Angel Island, located in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Until a fire led to its closure in 1940, the station primarily functioned as a detention center, where half a million people from 80 countries were held under barbaric conditions—some for weeks, others for years. The majority of these detainees were Chinese migrants, who were banned from entering the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, with few exceptions. Making his BAM debut, acclaimed Chinese-American composer Huang Ruo (M. Butterfly, An American Soldier, Book of Mountains & Seas) revisits this chapter of American history in Angel Island, a poignant multimedia experience scored for voices and string quartet that blurs the boundaries of opera, theater, dance and music. In collaboration with the Del Sol Quartet, the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, and archival filmmaker Bill Morrison, Huang Ruo and director Matthew Ozawa weave a powerful requiem from the century-old poetry engraved on the detention center’s walls by some of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants who were incarcerated and subjected to dehumanizing horrors. Angel Island arrives amid an ongoing epidemic of brutal violence and rampant discrimination against immigrants, asylum-seekers and Asians across the diaspora. This production is a stirring plea for care and empathy as well as a visceral, clear-eyed tribute to the rebellion and resilience of those who passed through and perished at Angel Island.
