Tjaividl1i Brooklyn Academy of Music 1996 Next Wave Festival
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tJAIVIDl1i Brooklyn Academy of Music 1996 Next Wave Festival Jim Dine, The Heart of BAM, 1996, Woodcut, 26-1/4" x 19-3/8" Artists in Action BAM 1996 Next Wave Festival and 135th Anniversary Season are sponsored by Philip Morris Companies Inc. The Brooklyn Snug Harbor Cultural The Brooklyn Museum Academy of Music Center Robert S. Rubin Bruce C. Ratner Ralph J. Lamberti Chairman, Chairman of the Board Chairman, Boa rd of Trustees Board of Directors Harvey Lichtenstein David E. Kleiser Roy R. Eddey President & President & CEO Acting President Executive Producer present Artists in Action BAM Visual Arts Initiative Flatland: A Romance MINE Black Fathers and of Many Dimensions Rona Pondick Sons: A US Perspective Jene Highstein and Robert Feintuch Albert Chong and Hanne Tierney with Sara Rudner with Johnny Coleman, The Hittite Empire and Quincy Troupe Snug Harbor Cultural The Brooklyn Museum BAM Majestic Theater Center November 7-9, 1996 November 13-16, November 21-23, at 8pm 1996 at 8pm 1996 at 8pm November 9 & 10 at 3pm photos, Brigitte Lacombe Special support for Artists In Action has been provided by The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Henry Luce Foundation, Inc., The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Greenwall Foundation, The Cowles Charitable Trust, and The Arch W. Shaw Foundation. During their years working with artists, Brooklyn Academy of Music President and Executive Producer Harvey Lichtenstein and Producing Director Joseph VlYlelillo noticed that visual artists and performing artists do not conceptualize performance space in the same way. This difference is the inspiration behind Artists in Action. Last year, in its first season, this program showcased works by Vito Acconci, lIya Kabakov and the team of Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel. Though each artist chose their own collaborators and produced works of varying tone and scope, all three productions demon strated that when you ask a visual artist to conceive and direct a staged work, certain long-held assumptions fall to the wayside, and a new set of challenges appear. A surprising anxiety for the makers of the mesmerizingly beautiful piece was the passage of time within the performance. Utilizing the projection of the single blink of a human eye, Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel's Interim: after the end and before the beginning dealt with the perception of time in daily life. "Before Chandralekha [their collaborator] came we were all worked up about 'What's going to happen?'" says Jones of her and Ginzel's project with the Indian choreographer at the Queens Museum of Art. "I mean, forty minutes is a hell of a long time!" The concern for Vito Acconci and The Mekons (who have experience in performance) was more a matter of "what kind of time would happen in that space." A sort of deconstructionist art-rock opera performed at the Dia Center for the Arts, Theater Project for a Rock Band utilized one of the great "instruments" of contemporary performance art-Acconci's voice-to weave its sardonic storytelling magic through The Mekons smart-rock riffs. Ilya Kabakov found that working to the rhythms of a viewer who sits in steady attention is a far different task than forging an object or installation where the viewer will come and go as he or she pleases. "When I am working on an installation, the most important thing is to condense an atmosphere" says Kabakov, "...the challenge here was to preserve the atmos phere and transfer it into the show so that it wouldn't disappear and would actually hold the show together." The result of his collaboration with choreographer David Dorfman and composer Vladimir Tarasov, The Flies: A Musical Phantasmagoria, was not really a performance at all, said Kabakov, but more "an experience of an artwork in a theater." This year's artists, each with their own finely developed aesthetic antennae-AlbertChong (photographer and installation artist), Jene Highstein (monumental sculptor) and Rona Pondick (installation artist)-have been working on their respective collaborations for the past nine months, encoun tering and resolVing their own sets of challenges. Yet, since the power of Artists in Action is not just the abstract work but its production in a specific performance space as well, even these artists themselves don't really know what they have made, until of course, it is presented. And so to view these collaborations is more than just the experience of another BAM event, it is witnessing the very moment of innovation itself. -Thyrza Nichols Goodeve The Brooklyn The Brooklyn Academy of Music, America's oldest performing arts center, Academy of Music was founded in 1859. After its first presentation in 1861, BAM quickly became the center of Brooklyn's cultural life. Since its inception, BAM has been committed to presenting the finest in traditional and contemporary performing arts, presenting many national and international artists, often in their New York and national debuts, in the fields of dance, music, theater, music-theater, and opera. Today, under the direction of President and Executive Producer Harvey Lichtenstein, BAM's commitment is two-fold: to artists of international stature and an artistic vision that encompasses the newest forms in the performing arts; and to the Brooklyn community, with programming for the borough's diverse population. The Brooklyn Museum The second largest art museum in New York State, The Brooklyn Museum has an encyclopedic collection of approximately 1.5 million objects, which range from ancient Egyptian masterpieces to contemporary art, that repre sent almost every culture. The Museum is located on Eastern Parkway at Washington Avenue in a 450,000 square foot Beaux-Arts building designed by McKim, Mead and White that is a New York City landmark and on the National Register of Historic Landmarks. Snug Harbor Cultural Snug Harbor Cultural Center is a major visual and performing arts center Center located at an historic nineteenth century site once known as Sailors Snug Harbor, a retirement home for "aged, decrepit and worn-out sailors" on the North Shore of Staten Island. The Cultural Center's assets include 28 -buildings and 83 acres of parklands set within the New York City limits. The site includes eight performance spaces, four art galleries, fifty artist studios, three dance studios, three assembly halls, five residential cottages and acres of open space. Snug Harbor is home to nineteen resident organizations, including the Staten Island Children's Museum, the Staten Island Botanical Garden, and varied smaller organizations. Along with its core of interdisciplinary programs, Snug Harbor provides year-round discipline-based programs in the performing and visual arts as well as related education and humanities activities. Pa rtici pati ng Institutions Conceived &directed by Jene Highstein, born in 1942, received his education at the University of Jene Highstein Maryland, the University of Chicago, and the Royal Academy in London. & Hanne Tierney In New York City in the early 1970s, the sculptor developed his work in association with Minimalist artists like Robert Grosvenor and Richard Nonas. Dramatized by Steel pipes which span rooms and massive mounds of concrete form the Hanne Tierney basis of Highstein's vocabulary of essential shapes and forms. He has refined and developed these simple, evocative forms in a variety of media, from Performed by black and white drawing to sculpture in cast iron, wood, glass and fabric. Hanne Tierney Highstein's sculptures have appeared in solo exhibitions at the Ace Gallery with Jene Highstein in Los Angeles, the Michael Klein Gallery in New York City, and the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY (1993); the Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Sculpture & elements by Francisco and The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC (1991); the Fabric Jene Highstein Workshop in Philadelphia, and Brown University in Providence, RI, and at & Hanne Tierney Wave Hill, Bronx, (1989), as well as other exhibition sites in the US and abroad. His work has also been exhibited in group exhibitions at MaMA and Video by at The Drawing Center in New York City, Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Jene Highstein Island City, and the Portland Art Museum (1993), among others. His work is represented in numerous museum collections including The Lighting design by Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum Trevor Brown of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum. He has also created major public works for outdoor sites including Music composed the Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, MO and Rutgers University. & performed by Jane Wang Over the past fifteen years, performance artist Hanne Tierney has developed her own "theater without actors." Taking the avant-garde's concept of abstrac Narrated by tion to its logical conclusion, Tierney isolates movement and gesture as the Frederick Ted Castle essential elements contributed by human actors. By using materials such as fabric, rope and pipe to articulate gesture, she attempts to focus the Sculpture fabricated by attention of the audience on the gesture rather than on the incident that it Gene Flores describes, allowing the gesture to become a universal expression. Tierney presented her version of Chekhov's The Seagull in New York at the Set &elements Sculpture Center Gallery (1995) and The Flynn Gallery (1993). She performed constructed by Stein's A Play Called Not and Now at the Henson Foundation International Pablo Narvaez Festival of Puppet Theatre at the Public Theater (1994) and in Lodz, Poland (1990) and Maeterlinck's The Intruder at the Guggenheim Museum. Her Incidental Construction Assistance: Pieces was presented at Lincoln Center (1992) and PSI Museum (1991); Wayne Ba rtlett her Variations on a Theme was performed at the Whitney Museum (1986). Sound Operator: Jane Wang plays acoustic bass, cello, piano and sings.