Ryan Trecartin is the voice of a generation … of monkeys who WhaTevEr. His films make me want to kill myself, like in a good way, because she is just.so.current.
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Posted inArt
An Interview with a Dead Greek Poet
Alexandre Singh’s The Humans—a play inspired by the comedies of my favorite Greek poet, Aristophanes—had sold out before I got around to buying tickets. I knew what I had to do: swallow $2.50 in quarters for raft fare across the Styx, and strangle myself.
Posted inPerformance
Original Sin, Original Theater
Experiencing “The Humans” does require some stamina, as it’s a three-hour long play that often dips into follies that can drag a bit long. Yet if you’re interested in theater, the influences of art’s obsession with forms, Shakespeare, Wodehouse, and scatological humor wrapped around a frame of the Greek satire of Aristophanes is an intriguing experiment.
Posted inPerformance
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Anna Nicole Smith
The quick burn of celebrity has rarely been as spectacular as in the rise and fall of Anna Nicole Smith. “She blazed like a comet, as in a shiny thing in the skies, that hangs around a bit, then suddenly dies, ” as the chorus of newscasters intones in the Anna Nicole opera that just ended its raunchy run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Posted inArt
The Rite of Autumn: Seven NYC Dance Events to Catch this Fall
When scheduling your fall NYC arts itinerary, don’t leave out dance. There is a storm of movement coming from both the established companies and individuals with experimental ideas about what movement and the body can mean on stage.
Posted inMusic
Watching the Planets Collide with Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, and Bryce Dessner
Space-themed music experiences were having something of a moment last week. While Oktophonie at the Park Avenue Armory brought the stark coldness of the world beyond our earth in minimal electronica, over at the Brooklyn Academy of Music there was Planetarium, a collaboration between Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, and Bryce Dessner.
Posted inNews
NYC Cultural Institutions Have Pension Payments Withheld While City Examines “Anomalies”
The New York Times reported yesterday that New York City is withholding payments this fiscal year into a pension system for many cultural centers with city contracts, such as the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Basically, the city is asking if the amount they have to pay into the retirement system has been overstated in the bookkeeping of these places.
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 New Kind of Theater Space Opens BAM to More Aggressive Work
Standing at the corner on which Jay-Z and Barbra Streisand helped anoint the new Barclays Center at the southern edge of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, it’s possible to feel an air of controversy around the 19,000-seat sports arena and concert venue that opened its doors for the very first time just weeks ago. Meanwhile, over at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), the 150-plus-year-old arts institution that has long helped to anchor the area, began inaugurating a new space of its own in September.
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.