This is the year of the robot, starting with the movie Ex Machina and filtering down to the performing arts, which have seen a spate of humans dancing with robots in touching pas de deux.
BAM
Posted inArt
Cuba’s Cinematic Revolution
Critical, frenzied, imaginative, and committed, the works of Communist Cuba’s first generation of filmmakers helped reinvigorate and reinterrogate revolutionary cinema.
Posted inNews
50 Protest Batsheva Dance Company Opening at BAM
Around 50 members of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement gathered at a rally yesterday in response to the premiere performance of Batsheva Dance Company’s four-day run of Sadeh21.
Posted inSponsored
BAM Presents “Exposed: Songs for Unseen Warhol Films,” Nov 6–8
In Exposed: Songs for Unseen Warhol Films, part of the BAM 2014 next Wave Festival and curated by The Andy Warhol Museum, 15 never-before-seen, digitally restored selections from the 1960s are unveiled.
Posted inPerformance
A Performance Artist’s Absurd Anatomical Odyssey
Nine o’clock: the stage lights dim and a spotlight illuminates a stuffed “hero” sandwich the size of a small sofa. The opening melody of Tina Turner’s “We Don’t Need Another Hero” — hit theme song from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome — fills BAM’s Fishman Space.
Posted inPerformance
Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet Salvage Songs from Hurricane Sandy
Laurie Anderson was already working on a cycle of songs with Kronos Quartet when on October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy rose the Hudson River into her West Village home.
Posted inArt
In Heaven There Is No Les Blank: The Rooted Works of a Great American Documentarian
Following the short stack of “Yum, Yum, Yum! 3 Movies by Les Blank,” which played at its Cinema Fest this past June, BAMcinématek is now serving up a 17-movie Blank banquet.
Posted inArt
A Documentarian of Memory
Chris Marker’s death two years ago, on the day of his 91st birthday, heralded a surge of renewed interest in the enigmatic French filmmaker. With an impressive retrospective centered on a digital restoration of the film Level Five (1997), the Brooklyn Academy of Music presses on with the project of rehabilitating the fringes of Marker’s career.
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Debuts Distinguish BAMcinemaFest 2014
Opening tonight with the New York premiere of Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s highly anticipated coming-of-age tale, the sixth incarnation of BAMcinemaFest finds the festival itself approaching maturity.
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Announcing the 10th Annual BAM Art Auction
BAM, in collaboration with Artsy, is proud to announce its 10th Annual BAM Art Auction.
Posted inArt
Our Robots, Ourselves
Despite our intense familiarity with machines, there’s still something a bit foreboding about our increasingly sophisticated mechanical creations. Generally they are not evil natured or programmed to destroy us (like those pink robots after Yoshimi), but sometimes there’s a feeling of not being entirely in control of our docile electronic devices, an undercurrent creators have long fed on in iconic ways, whether it’s HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey or the seamlessly human-like replicants in Blade Runner, all reflecting back our own insecurities about robots in our lives.
Posted inPerformance
A Play Brings the Politics of Fascism to 21st-Century America
As a high school kid, I thought Eugène Ionesco was pretty much one of the best writers I had encountered up to that point. He was an entrenched misanthrope with a brutal wit who wasn’t afraid to take on politics, philosophy, and the unfortunate realities of human interaction. And, most importantly to me at that time, one of his sharpest tools was his sense of the absurd. As a teenager who had moved a number of times and changed schools every couple of years, who spent most of her time in her own head or with her nose in books, and who was grappling with depression and a latent queerness, absurdity made perfect sense to me. The world outside of my head was excruciatingly absurd and twisted to me then, and most of the time I hated it and assumed it hated me right back. Ionesco was perfect.