Encorethe Performing Arts Magazine Tlmewarner I ~Ambill Sep 2009 Contents

2009 Next Wave Festival Adam fuss, For Allegra, 2009 BAM 2009 Next Wave festival is part of New Works and Diverse Voices at BAM sponsored by: ENCOREThe Performing Arts Magazine TlmeWarner I ~AMbill Sep 2009 Contents Lipsynch Robert Lepage crosses many borders by Jacob Gallagher-Ross 12 ~~ '.'..' .... , The Long Count '" Upsynch. Baseball and Mayan mythology in Photo: Erick Labbe a ri ch visual and aural mix by Susan Yung 14 1962 BAMcinematek focuses on an array of films from a year without awards by Aisling Yeoman 18 Anouk Aimee in Lola, in BAMcinematek's 1962 series. Upcoming Events 20 Photo: Photo!est Program 22 BAM Directory 34 Cover Artist Adam Fuss was born in London in 1961, and grew up in rural England. He became interested in the naturalistic surround ings and was soon documenti ng them through photography. Since 1982, he has lived and worked in New York City and has shown extensively internationa lly since his first one person exhibiti on in New York in 1985. It was during this pe ri od when Fuss bega n experimenting with unconventiona l photography and eventua lly abandoned the camera. His work is distinctive for its contemporary re-interpretation of photography's earliest techniques, par ticu larly the camera-less techniques of daguer-reotype and photogram . Exploring themes of life, death, and transcendence Fuss states that in order for any photographic technique to work, it should be personal- ized and transfigured into a greater metaphor, engaging processes that take place in the natural world . Fuss has exhibited widely including Adam Fuss solo shows Focus: Adam Fuss, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth , TX For Allegra, 2009 (2006); and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2002). Group shows include Pigment Print, 88" x 60" Picturing Eden , George Eastman House, New York (2006); Closer to Courtesy of the artist and Home, 48th Corcoran Biennial, Corcoran Gallery, Washington , DC Cheim and Read Gallery, New York (2005); Visions of America: Photographs from the Whitney Museum of American Art 1940-2001, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002). His work is represented in many American and interna Proceeds from the sale of this work tional collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; benefit BAM. For information on this Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, and other BAMart offerings, contact New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and the David Harper at 718.636.4101 or Victoria and Albert Museum, London. His work features in monographs [email protected]. including Adam Fuss, Arena Editions (2004), and My Ghost, Twin Palms Publishers (2002). 11 Lipsynch Crossing Borders By Jacob Gallagher-Ross "Crossing geographic borders," theatrical auteur Robert Lepage once aphorized, "is also a way of crossing artistic borders." These two imperatives have defined the director's cosmopolitan life and restlessly innovative work. His epic creations traverse continents and epochs: The Dragons' Trilogy (1985) traces the troubled history of Canada's Chinese communities, wending its way across the nation from Quebec City to Vancouver; The Seven Streams of the River Ota (1994) meditates on the 20th century's litany of ca lamities, beginning with Hiroshima, and rippling outward to encompass the Holocaust and AIDS. Lepage last visited BAM in 1999 with The Geometry of Miracles, a piece that juxtaposed Frank Lloyd Wright's sou lfu l architecture with mystic Georgei Gurdjeff's attempts to sketch the architecture of the soul. (Throughout his career, BAM has been Lepage's artistic pied a terre in New York, also hosting Needles and Opium, Seven Streams, Polygraph, and a number of his opera stagings) . He returns to BAM's Harvey Theater this fall with Upsynch, from Oct 3-1l. Looking at periods of mass migration, mass destruction, and mass communication, Lepage stubbornly asserts the value of personal experience in a widening world. He bounds his world-historical interests within the nomadic trajectories of individuals linked by accidents of fate. For Lepage, journeys through time and space are also voyages into the self-his figures find themselves by losing their bearings. This double vision-seeing networks of contingent lives against the broadest possible historical and cu ltural backdrops-makes Lepage an artist for our interconnected era, as electronic media, interlaced economies, and cross-border travel erode distinctions between the local and the global. Such vast narratives demand equally expansive stagings-both the Dragons' Trilogy and Seven Streams were more than six hours long in their final versions; Upsynch exceeds both at eight-and-a half hours (it will be presented in three successive weeknight performances, as well as in marathon weekend performances; see BAM .org for details). During these marathon presentations, which include four intermissions and a dinner break, performers and audience members undertake an expedition together. Removed from habitual expectations of duration and resolution, spectators are freed from time's fetters-visiting Lepage's theatrical landscapes without a map. Like his itinerant characters, they are loosed from everyday life, immersed in unaccustomed sights. 12 Lipsynch Lepage's peripatetic career path flouts disciplinary boundaries. In addition to original theatrical pieces devised with a rotating constellation of international collaborators, he has directed feature filrns, classics in Europe's national theaters, and operas (he is about to ernbark on a staging of Wagner's Ring cycle for the Met). He conceived a large-scale theater work for Cirque de Solei I in Las Vegas, radically different frorn the troupe's other works, and scored the spectacular aspects of Peter Gabriel's concerts. Touring is an intrinsic part of Lepage's creative rnethod; his creations are transforrned by the kind of globetrotting journeys they depict. At each stop, Lepage absorbs criticisrn and approbation, rnodulating his work accordingly. Renowned for his revisions, the director refuses to set a script until the last possible moment-no show is finished until its run is over. Characters and plotlines disappear and resurface in changed form . Pieces appear in multiple versions, sometimes doubling or even tripling in length. "I don't think about rehearsing a show," Lepage explains. " ... Over a period of time the show gradually reveals itself to us." A Quebecois from Anglophone-majority Canada, Lepage's background gives him a unique perspective on the fusions and confusions of our globalized world. Navigating between cultures, he has always been attuned to language's political dimensions. His polyglot pieces often feature dialogue in multiple tongues, embodying the links between native speech and identity-the ways in which our language speaks us. With productions in repertory across the planet, he continues to develop his work at La Caserne, a renovated firehouse turned technological wonderland in his hometown of Quebec City. Perhaps more than any other director of the last 20 years, Lepage has helped bring theater into the media age. Recognizing that today's spectators are fluent in the narrative idioms of commercials, movies, and music videos, he employs filmic storytelling techniques-jump-cutting, cross-fading, and flashing forward. Celebrated for his technical wizardry, he uses electronic devices-projections, video feeds, protean machinery, digital soundscapes-to create startling onstage transformations and lyrical visual metaphors. In Upsynch, the assembly of a seamless filmed sequence from disparate onstage components evokes the human capacity to synthesize meaning from diverse sensory data. Five years in the making, Upsynch has been refined during recent visits to Newcastle, London, and Toronto. The piece's point of departure is the most intimate of journeys-the route of the human voice from sound to meaning. "The voice," writes Lepage, "is internal machinery that finds its ultimate expression outside the body." In nine segments joining a host of characters across frontiers and generations-from WWII Vienna to latter-day London-Upsynch plays variations on the tension between artifice and authenticity in oral communication. Scenes revolve around the manifold ways that vocal noise becomes sense or music: operatic song and percussive rap, dubbed dialogue, voiceover narration, overlapping tracks, advertising pitches, speech therapy for aphasics. These layers and manipulations remind us that saying even the simplest thing requires crossing multiple borders between thought and word, sound and meaning, interior and exterior, speaker and listener. The perishable instant of human understanding completes the most remarkable voyage of all. _ Jacob Gallagher-Ross is a DFA candidate at the Yale School of Drama, and an associate editor of Theater magazine. 13 The Long Count Mayan Mythology & Baseball by Susan Yung The themes informing the multimedia performance work The Long Count are as rich and varied as the collaborators and performers themselves. It was conceived and executed by visual artist Matthew Ritchie and musicians and twin brothers Bryce and Aaron Dessner (The National, Clogs), and features fellow twins Kim and Kelley Deal of The Breeders, and singers Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond) and Matt Berninger (The National) . For example, two central motifs-the Mayan creation myth of Popul Vuh, featuring multiple sets of twins, and the late 1970s domination of baseball's Cincinnati Reds-may seem at first glance an unlikely pa iring, but upon further investigation illuminates the personal and creative symbiosis of the three lead collaborators. The Long Count will be performed from Oct 28-31 as part of BAM's 2009 Next Wave Festival. As the Dessners explained before a recent rehearsal at BAM, "When Matthew started ta lking about the Mayan story, we were looking for a personal connection to it, which is how baseball came up." Bryce and Aaron were born in 1976 in Cincinnati, the year of the Reds' World Series victory over the Yankees; they now reside in Brooklyn . They collected baseball cards and memorabilia as boys, and still have in their old room a signed picture of Pete Rose diving head long into home plate.

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