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BAM's Big Next Wave Festival: Brooklyn's Showcase for Emerging and Consecrated Avant-Garde Artists
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13931 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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2 / 1988 |
693 Words |
| Author
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Cynthia Grenier
Cynthia Grenier is contributing editor to the Arts section of
The World & I. |
The Brooklyn Academy of Music, a New York institution more familiarly known as BAM, has gathered together every fall since 1981 what has become the biggest assemblage of avant-grade performing art in the United States. BAM is probably the most important presenter of nontraditional opera, dance, and music in the country today, despite its remote location across the East River in an unfashionable section of Brooklyn.
The Brooklyn Academy's neo-Renaissance building contains three theaters holding audiences ranging form six hundred to two thousand people, and this year the organization took over and reactivated an old movie house for the presentation of Peter Brook's marathon production of Mahabharata. BAM has thus been capable of presenting monumental works, as well as introducing emerging artists whose work originated in lofts and alternative spaces.
Resolutely Fashionable
BAM's audience, 80 percent under the age of forty, is resolutely trend-conscious, fashionable, and affluent, habitually looking like a page out of Details or Interview, and constantly in quest of the most innovative, unorthodox, and experimental in art forms. A not-for-profit institution, backed by subscriptions and memberships, federal, state, and city grants, as well as donations from major corporations and foundations--American Telephone and Telegraph, Philip Morris Companies, Inc., Rockefeller and Ford Foundations--BAM now runs in the black after a long period of being heavily in debt. Productions like the Mahabharata alone cost close to $2 million.
In the past, the
... (1997 of 4390 Characters)
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