“When we meet the very best, we have to give up,” baritone Rod Gilfry intoned in The Loser, composer David Lang’s one-act opera that debuted last week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Posted inFilm
The Lasting Effects of a Broken Home in a Follow-Up to a 1983 Documentary
Martin Bell’s Streetwise (1984) endures. It’s a documentary that has spawned countless discussions on homeless children over the years.
Posted inPerformance
A 1944 Dalí Backdrop Gets Its Own Surreal Circus
The archives of the Metropolitan Opera can seem like some kind of pharaonic tomb, packed as they are with theatrical treasures.
Posted inMusic
Singing Along with Two Titans of Brazilian Music
My roommate once noted how I only sing in the apartment when we play Brazilian music.
Posted inPerformance
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.
Posted inPerformance
David Byrne’s Avant-Color Guard
If you’ve ever been to a high school or college football game, chances are you’ve seen a color guard.
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 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
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.
Posted inFilm
Invisible Cities: Matthew Barney’s Blindspot
Let’s look past the globules, barnacles, and goo. At its heart, Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament is a film about white, male America’s failure to comprehend urbanism.
Posted inArt
Wading in Matthew Barney’s River of Shit
In the opening of his review of Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament for GalleristNY, Michael H. Miller writes that “it feels perverse to attempt to review, or even summarize” the six-hour-long film (including two intermissions), which premiered on Wednesday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I’m not normally prone to be suspicious of an artist’s intentions, but part of me suspects that this is what Matthew Barney wants.