~La6(8Ill COMPANIES INC
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
April 2001 2001 Sprin Andres Serrano. Hooded Warbler II. 2000 BAM Spring Season sponsor: PHILIP MORRIS ~lA6(8Ill COMPANIES INC. BA 1\/1 Stagphi II Contents • April 2001 Dansez-Vous? 8 France Moves presents programs at BAMcinematek and BAMcafe, as well as two thrilling dance pieces: Philippe Decoufle's Shazam! and Compagnie Montalvo-Hervieu's Le Jardin io io ito ito. By Roslyn Sulcas The Play 's the Thing 16 Director Peter Brook strip-searches the text of Shakespeare's Hamlet to offer the play's bare necessities. By Stan Schwartz Program 25 Upcoming Events 50 BAMdirectory 54 The Tragedy of Hamlet Photo by P. Victor/MAXPPP Co\/or 1\ rtict Andres Serrano was born in New York City in 1950 and studied art at the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1967 to 1969. His artworks have been exhibited in galleries and institutions around the world . He has had numerous one-person exhibitions, including "Body and Soul," a traveling exhibition seen in Norway, Germany, and England, and mid-career retrospectives at The Institute of Contemporary Art/Philadelphia and the Groninger Museum/The Netherlands. His photographs have been included in many group shows, with recent exhibitions at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City; the Serpentine Art Gallery, London; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. He is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York City. Andres Serrano BAM Photography Portfolio Hooded Warbler II, The Andres Serrano image on the cover is from BAM's new Photography 2000 Portfolio. The portfolio features 11 images donated to BAM by Richard 20" x 24" Avedon, Adam Fuss, Ralph Gibson, Nan Goldin, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Courtesy Paula Cooper Annie Leibovitz, Jack Pierson, Richard Prince, Andres Serrano, Cindy Gallery, New York Sherman, and William Wegman. All prints are 20 x 24 inches, signed and For BAMart informa numbered in an edition of 40. They will be delivered to buyers in custom tion, contact Deborah made linen portfolio boxes designed especially for BAM by John Cheim . The Bowie at pre-publication initial offering is $15,000 + tax and shipping. The portfolio is 718.636.4138 published by Serge Sorokko Ga llery of New Yo rk and San Francisco. 4 As part of the citywide France In France, Philippe Decoufle is virtually a house hold name, famous for brilliantly staging the Moves festival, BAM presents two opening and closing ceremonies of the Albertville stunning dance pieces from across Winter Olympics in 1992, and subsequently at tracting huge audiences all over the world to the the Atlantic: Philippe Decoufle's exhilarating works created for his company DCA (Defense Contre Avion, or, in English , Defense Shazam! and Compagnie Montalvo Against Airplane). Despite his renown, Decou Hervieu's Le Jardin io io ito ito. fie's work has not been seen in the U.S. until this season, when BAM presents Shazam! (April By Roslyn Sulcas 25 , 27- 29) as part of France Moves, a citywide festival celebrating French contemporary dance. "Shazam!" the magician's triumphant cry as he unveils a trick, is an apt title for a Decoufle work, made up of equal parts of dance, circus, mime, illusion, and good old-fashioned showmanship. In fact, Decoufle's first theatrical ambitions cen tered around the circus rather than dance-he began attending the Ecole de Cirque in Paris at age 15, then Marcel Marceau's classes in mime, finally going on to study with Alwin Niko lais at the choreographer's dance school in Angers. In 1982, when he was 18, a grant en Le Jardin io io ito ito Photo by Laurent Philippe abled him to come to New York, where he went 8 on working with Nikolais and took a dance and video workshop with Merce Cunningham and Elliot Caplan. "The workshop made a huge impression on me," says Decoufle. "It taught me the basic rules of perspective and movement." He went back to France energized by New York: "I didn't really think about my own company, but I had lots of ideas. I wanted to make short pieces-like record singles-but I didn't know how to do that in dance." Decoufle joined Regine Chopinot's company, danced with Karole Ar mitage, and in 1983 won first prize at the Bag nolet Choreography Contest with Vague Cafe. "I had been to watch Bagnolet before," he remarks, revealing an early theatrical sawy, "and I thought, how odd that no one does what is nec essary to win! So I decided that I'd do it myself, and it was really very enjoyable." Bagnolet launched DCA, and Decoufle went on to make several small-scale works over the next few years. "Things happen slowly with me," he says. "I take a long time to create each piece, and Codex, in 1986, was the first work I made that was over an hour long. " Based on an imagi nary encyclopedia by Luigi Serafini , "in a non existent language, about a non-existent world," Scenes from Shazam! Photos by Bertoux/Enguerand Codex , a popular and critical success, proved a tuming point for Decoufle. "I realized that if you do something in a very serious and organized way, you can carry off the most crazy, illogical things ," he says. He went on to make several more dance pieces, short films, and video cl ips for the bands New Order and Fine Young Canni bals, then shot to fame with Albertville. Rejecting most of the commercial offers that subsequently came his way, Decoufle chose to continue work ing with his company in the low-key surround ings of the working-class Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, where DCA has its headquarters. "I'm not a businessman ," he says, "and I want to do exactly what I want to do." In Shazamf , which grew from a commission for the Cannes Film Festival 's 50th Anniversary, he has steered away from the elaborate costumes, cartoon imagery, and stage ma'chinery that have characterized much of his work. Instead, he offers us a world wherein illusion and reality are seamlessly interwoven through a magisterial deployment of interactive video, film, and fluid, crystalline dance. Dancers on stage and film 10 challenge our convictions about who is real and chant for composing a piece through short vi who isn't; mirrors enlarge perspective and dimen gnettes; in the case of Le Jardin, there are a sions; alternately opaque and translucent screens hundred overlapping sequences that display a turn two dancers into four, then eight; impossible breathtaking mix of physical skills and witty sequences on-screen are re-created, movement comic flair in conjunction with films that allow perfect, before our eyes moments later. our sense of gravity and logic to be suspended in a riotous amalgam of fact and fantasy. While Decoufle's work is all about sleight-of hand, transformation, and illusion, it is also Montalvo attributes much of the imagery of his about detail and timing--elements that trans work to his upbringing as the son of immigrant mute individual ideas into a collage of resonantly Spaniards, who fled to Toulouse after the Spanish humorous and poetic images. Set to compelling Civil War. ''At Christmas," he says "my family rhythms by Sebastien Libolt and the band La Tra would be surrounded by friends, from all over Eu bant (who appear live onstage), Shazam! shows rope and North Africa, who had fought in the war. that technology can reveal an essential humanity: Everyone told stories, danced flamenco, sang, the real magic is made anew at each perfor played the mandolin; everyone could be a virtuoso mance by the dancers. for a moment. What I want to convey is this child like feeling of jubilant excitement, of joy in life." Technology and film are also part of Le Jardin io As a teenager, Montalvo signed up for dance io ito ito, a work by the Compagnie Montalvo classes, but had no intention of pu rsu i ng a the Hervieu, which follows DCA at BAM just a few atrical career. He moved to Paris at age 20 to days later (May 2, 4, 5), also as a part of France study art and architecture, and began to take Moves. Like Decoufle, choreographers Jose classes with the American choreographer Jerome Montalvo and Dominique Hervieu have a pen- Andrews, who was to have a profound influence Le Jardin io io ito ito Photo by Laurent Philippe 12 upon him . "He integrated Thai, African , Japanese Hervieu in 1988, but soon turned away from dances," says Montalvo. "He made me realize stage performances to work in non-theatrical that dance was an art, and what I thought was a contexts, like a psychiatric hospital, or in town hobby turned into a profession." Montalvo joined squares, creating simple dance sequences for the Ballet Moderne de Paris and began to teach large numbers of people (7,000 on one occa in the early 1980s. It was then that he met Do sion). "We wanted to democratize art," says minique Hervieu, for whom he began to create Hervieu, "to give people pleasure and change short solos. They won several choreographic their relationship with their bodies and their view prizes and formed the Compagnie Montalvo- of stage performance." In 1993 Montalvo began working with video imagery-"before it became fashionable," he France Moves at BAMcafe points out. "Technology invades every aspect of Six performances of eclectic programming our life today, but I was interested in putting it to including French-flavored jazz, cabaret, poetic ends', putting technique at the service of dance parties, and altemative music.