October, 1988 -- -- - • -' - • ® BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL SPONSORED BY PHILIP MORRIS COMPANIES INC. --- -·-·- Brooklyn Academy of Music NEXT WAVE Festival Sponsored by Philip Morris Companies, Inc. October, 1988 Volume 6, No. I CONTENTS Knee-deep in Reality: Lee Breuer and His Trouble by James Leverett . 3 Susan Marshall's World of Quiet Eloquence by Susan Reiter ........................ ........ .. .. .............. 8 Outside the Mainstream by Tim Page ...... ... ..... ... ......................... .. ... .... II The Heroic Vision of Gilgamesh by Elizabeth Williams .. ... .. ..... .. .......... .. .. ...... ..... .... 13 David Byrne's Musical World by Robert Farris Thompson .. .. ...... .. ............. ..... ........... 16 Trying to Play Life: The Music of M-Base by Suzanne McElfresh .............................. .. ....... ....... 20 A Language of Images . ......................... ..... ....... ........ 23 Cover: Photographs of artists who have The NEXT WAVE Festival is produced by the participated in the NEXT WAVE Festival Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette by Betty Freeman. These photographs, and Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, 11217 many others, will be part of an exhibit of Ms . Freeman's photographs, Music People ON THE NEXT WAVE is published by and Others, that will be on display in the the Humanities Program of the BAM BAM lobby from October 28 through NEXT WAVE Festival. December 18. Betty Freeman is one of America's Editor: Roger W. Oliver foremost supporters and promoters Associate Editor: Rory MacPherson of contemporary art and music. She is the founder/secretary of the contemporary Design: Jon Crow/Advance Graphic Art Council of the Los Angeles County NEXT WAVE logo design: Museum and a longtime patron of such Valerie Pettis + DOUBLESPACE contemporary artists as john Cage, Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Robert Wilson . She © 1988 by the Brooklyn Academy of Music began taking photographs in 1972 while she was producing a prize-winning docu­ mentary film on composer Harry Partch. Music People and Others was exhibited at the Decolage Gallery in Milan, Italy in 1987 and at the Los Angeles Music Center earlier this year. The catalog of the exhibi­ tion will be available in the BAM lobby. • Knee-deep in Reality: I want not one impossible thing, but two Out of not one impossible need, but two Called not one impossible name, but two I am not one impossible me, but two Breuer, Hajj "Brazil! Trinidad! You who have your theatres rolling and dancing through the streets. In our mausoleums at the Kennedy and Lincoln Centers we hear you faintly. Breuer, "The Theatre and Its Trouble" What I really wanna be is the fool who rushed in. Breuer, in the Village Voice Bob Telson (left) and Lee Breuer, the creators of The Warrior Ant. 3 Lee Breuer and His Trouble by James Leverett This summer, the only way to talk was rehearsing the company in a under her wing. Its members thought with Lee Breuer was to ride with him. production of Lear-Shakespeare's play, they were about to spend their penuri­ The reaction of friends anxious for my yes, but with Maleczech in the title role ous summer near Mabou Mines, Nova safety was an instant, "They gave him a and all of the other parts gender­ Scotia, and they liked the sound of it. license1" As a driver he's actually fine, reversed as well. They ended up instead in nearby Mar­ but neither of us is an ace at finding the No wonder a Mabou Mines gathering garee Harbor. Lee has never even been shortest distance between two points. had collectively blanched when I inno­ to Mabou Mines, although founding We began late one July morning as cently remarked that I needed a few members JoAnne Akalaitis and Philip the heat was rolling in to soak New hours of Breuer's time to talk about his Glass, who were then married, still have York in a vitriolic summer-long broth. grandiose epic while he was rehearsing summer places in the vicinity. After a couple of my jittery has-he-left­ their great tragedy. They knew, some Now nearing its twentieth anniver­ yet calls to the Mabou Mines office, after decades of experience, that at the sary, Mabou has been admired for its Breuer's rented compact pulled up in heart of his creativity is a maniacal collaborative longevity and diverse front of the Cafe Dante on Macdougal compulsion to switch roles, thought productivity in spite of the encroach­ Street just as a damp, roseate Wally systems, art forms, lovers, area codes, ments of poverty, philistinism and mid­ Shawn struggled past from the other races, genders, classes, nationalities, in dle age-a rather rosey mythology for direction, dragging a collection of bags midstream, mid-conversation, mid­ an often raspingly opinionated and per­ and parcels, on his way out of town to metaphor, mid-word. They also knew versely weird collection of sensibilities. shoot a movie. Breuer joyously rolled his sometimes calamitous proclivity for The need among these intransigent down his window and offered him a juggling several mammoth projects at individuals to operate collectively, and part in The Warrior Ant. Also delighted, once. Hadn't he tried, with disastrous of this stalwartly persevering collective but disoriented, Shawn wrote his phone effect, to direct a section of Gospel at to strike off individually, sets up polar number on the bag of iced cappucino I Co/onus at the Avignon Festival and tensions and ironic contradictions that had brought from the Dante. oversee the Los Angeles company of animate the group as a whole and its The next stop was Breuer's mother's his doo-wop opera Sister Suzy Cinema individual members. apartment in Chelsea to leave her some over the phone while he was rehearsing According to Breuer, The B. Beaver money. On the way he explained that The Tempest in Central Park for Joseph took a year to make because everyone he had been dreaming of Wally for the Papp-a Tempest with eleven Ariels, was arguing all the time, but the first role of a kind of rabbinical commenta­ including a Sumo wrestler and several external sign of internal stress came in tor to comment on a kind of Rasta small children/ 1978 with the production of the final commentator who would comment on Breuer has never taken an easy path. animation, The Shaggy Dog. By that what was going on in his mock heroic Via negativa is a favorite phrase in his time, his place as the company's de epic about a Samurai ant whose father eclectic lexicon. After wanderjahre, facto artistic director, indeed artistic was really a termite. He also mused first on the West Coast in the interval conceiver, was under total siege, most about supporting his many dependents, between Beatniks and Flower Children, pressingly by Akalaitis. As Mabou irony including his mother, two children by his then in Europe and adjacent parts of would have it, she was also the principal wife Ruth Maleczech, two more from A sia and Africa, his career merged with animator of Rose, the central figure in other provenances, and a fifteen-year­ that of Mabou Mines. Just as he-in Breuer's text and a contemporary old Siberian husky named Little, who spite of his gum-chewing deal-making woman's nightmare of identity. Rose had been the inspiration for another mythology-was not born in California was a puppet (Akalaitis' exact double in epic, The Shaggy Dog. Little, incidentally, but in Philadelphia, Mabou Mines was miniature) and the obsessive, masochis­ now lay on a towel in the backseat and not born in Canada but out of a group tic lover of a macho human master­ would remain there, silent and in seem­ that formed in Paris in the late sixties. the titular shaggy dog herself. ing bliss, during the whole trip, sweetly It returned here to experience avant­ Breuer and Akalaitis have not worked incontinent in her dotage. garde adulation and scraping poverty together again. She plunged ahead with We were off up the river, our desti­ while performing Beckett's Play, Come her first two successes, Beckett's Cas­ nation Cornwall-on-Hudson where and Go and The Lost Ones, and the first cando and her own creation, Dressed Mabou Mines was in residence for a of the Breuer "animations," The Red Like an Egg, based on Colette. He, month at The Theatre Institute at Horse and The B. Beaver, in galleries though experiencing a writing break­ Storm King. Between summer presenta­ and museums. through with Shaggy Dog ("I had found tions of chunks of The Warrior Ant at Mabou Mines began formally in 1970 my own style and was not writing a Spoleto in South Carolina and the when it actually went inside a theater. derivative or influenced style"), American Music Theater Festival in La Mama's Ellen Stewart needed a name drowned for a time in an identity crisis Philadelphia, and its opening at BAM 's in order to tell her funders about the and felt in danger of "vanishing." Both 4 NEX T WAVE Festival in the fall, Breuer new collective she was briefly taking he and Akalaitis now do separate • projects within the framework of the company (Lear and her upcoming "Mor­ mon Project") and outside it (Warrior Ant and her Green Card, seen this sum­ mer at the Joyce Theatre). As Breuer described the Mabou situa­ tion to Ross Wetzsteon in his compre­ hensive 1987 Village Voice interview, "The two poles are ardent feminists and the macho pig." Getting into trou­ ble is Lee Breuer's trouble, and his art. Little, the original Shaggy Dog, sleeps quietly in the back as we miss our turn and continue up the Hudson. Breuer is well into a two-hour aria, punctuated only by occasional murmurs from me­ vain efforts to enter the stream.