What to Send Up When It Goes Down holds Black people at its center, inviting unique moments of commiseration, anger, and helplessness with no apologies.
BAM Fisher
Home Alone, With a Few Pills: Franz Xaver Kroetz’s ‘Request Concert’
With its task-based script, Request Concert may remind some of Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, tightly shot inside a small apartment. The pairing of everyday housework with suicide might also call to mind Marsha Norman’s 1983 play ‘Night Mother.
Dancing Around the Issue of Surveillance
Audiences entering the black box space of BAM Fisher in Brooklyn for More up a Tree found a transparent room containing a man sprawled on his back, and a woman nervously pacing.
The Light Bulb Moment: Eclipse Debuts in New BAM Space
The British sculptor and installation artist Anthony McCall’s sculptural parallax of thirty-six, 300-watt incandescent bulbs is a site-specific installation for BAM’s new 250-seat Fisher building, made in conjunction with Jonah Bokaer, the thirty-something dance whiz kid. Bokaer was the youngest member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and founder of Chez Bushwick, and his relation to McCall tiptoes around the famed collaborations between Isamu Noguchi and the Martha Graham Company, or Cunningham and Andy Warhol’s helium filled silver pillows. Those collaborations pivoted sculptural sets as integral parts of the choreography.