The upcoming Next Wave Festival will feature intimate dinner party performances, an immersive fire and brimstone show, and numerous dance performances. Brooklyn Academy of Musicsaid the Performing Arts Center on Friday.
The festival will be the last to be programmed under Artistic Director David Binder. Earlier this year, he announced that he would retire on July 2 and transition to the role of artistic advisor. An interim artistic director will be announced in the coming weeks.
The celebrated festival will scale back this year, running seven programs from October 19th to January 13th, nearly half of the previous year’s. Festival content has been steadily declining in recent years. There were 16 programs featured in Next Wave in 2019, down from 31 in 2017.
“We like to think of it as being dense and not necessarily shrinking,” said Amy Casero, BAM’s associate director of artistic programming. “I think it’s no secret that arts institutions are under pressure for funding.”
The program is an “incredibly intentional effort,” she says.
First on the schedule is the US premiere of “Broken Chord,” a revival of South Africa’s first black choir by South African dancer and choreographer Gregory Makoma and composer Tutuka Sibisi (October 19-21). Using atmospheric soundscapes and traditional Xhosa movements, the performance features one dancer, four vocal soloists, and a live local choir.
Also lined up is “Food,” a surreal interactive dinner performance by theater producer Jeff Sobel (November 2-18), where the audience gathers around a giant banquet table. The show, which premiered at the 2022 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, was called “a meditation on what, how and why we eat” by New York Times critic Alexis Soroski. is the third in a trilogy of Sobel performance works at BAM. “The Object Lesson” in 2014 and “Home” in 2017.
Artist and filmmaker Lynette Wallworth’s How to Live After You Die (December 7-9) is a personal monologue about the lure of cults and the limits of organized religion. Choreographer Trajal Harrell’s “The Cologne Concert” (November 2-4) is a dance piece inspired by Keith Jarrett’s genre-skipping piano recording of the same name, featuring Harrell’s Schauspiel. Performed by the Haus Zurich Dance Ensemble. And choreographer Rashid Oulamdane’s aerial dance piece “Corps Extremes” (27-29 October) contemplates the space between earth and sky against the backdrop of climbing walls and high hanging ropes. .
The season concludes with Huang Ruo’s The Island of Angels (January 11-13), an opera theater piece about the plight of Chinese immigrants detained under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1883. Del Sol In collaboration with his quartet, the Trinity Wall Street choir and archival filmmaker Bill Morrison, Luo’s BAM debut is a multimedia requiem based on the poems inscribed on the walls of the prison. will be unveiled.
“BAM has always said to follow artists,” Cassello said. “The work at this festival is very closely related to contemporary issues. We don’t take it for granted that people want to go back to theater.”
