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      Review: In ‘Bottom of the Ocean,’ a Deep Dive Into the Soul

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      Themes of change, death and rebirth abound in this peculiar production, a triumph of style and low-budget ingenuity.A spa day, a sound bath, a moving meditation and an initiation into strange and tentacled rites, “Bottom of the Ocean,” an immersive experience staged in a semifinished Brooklyn basement, ranks as the weirdest show in town right now, in a town that doesn’t lack for weird. How odd is it? Show me another work that hides baby octopuses (yes, OK, fake baby octopuses) in its communal bathroom.“Bottom of the Ocean” is the third production, following “Houseworld” and “Whisperlodge,” from Andrew Hoepfner, who runs a newish company, called Houseworld Immersive, dedicated to participatory theater. I had missed the two earlier shows, but over the last month or so, a couple of friends had recommended “Bottom of the Ocean” and I had heard it mentioned in conversation. Booking a ticket began to feel a little like destiny. And there are worse Tuesday-night fates than being delivered to the basement door of a 19th-century church across the street from a smoke and vape shop. Knock at the appointed time and a small window will open. Speak the password and a man in elaborate robes will play a xylophone, welcoming you into new worlds.Undersea motif: An installation of baby octopuses in a bathroom at “Bottom of the Ocean.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesI can’t really tell you what “Bottom of the Ocean” — which you can experience singly, doubly or in a group of five — is about. Probably I shouldn’t. Immersion depends on surprise, on not knowing what you will encounter around the next corner. More abstract than immersive hits like “Sleep No More” or “Then She Fell,” “Bottom of the Ocean” dilates, broadly, on themes of change, death and rebirth. There is often an undersea motif, though that evaporates in certain rooms.The show borrows, ecumenically, from ancient rites (the Eleusinian Mysteries seem to be a particular point of inspiration) and New Age practices. It invents some rituals outright. At one point I may have worshiped a jellyfish.Throughout, the performance insists on radical intimacy. During the preshow, you will be given a safe word that you can utter if touch is not your thing, though the touch provided is gentle and respectful and never delivered without consent. But not all intimacy is physical. The three actors (Hoepfner, Chia Kwa and Naja Newell on the night I attended) play characters, but you play only yourself. And in the course of the performance you will be asked to offer up your own regrets, desires and prayers.I am unaccustomed to making disclosures like these to strangers. I barely make them to my therapist. So if you pride yourself on privacy and personal boundaries, the show may induce some very squirmy feelings. (Maybe that squirminess is appropriate for a show with so many cephalopods.) Those, like me, with lousy night vision, should proceed with caution. The stairs are steep. And those, again like me, who don’t love to sing in public — well, do your warm-ups.Chia Kwa appears in a show that “privileges interiority and reflection over action, sending each participant on a private journey toward something like peace,” our critic writes.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesI have sometimes thought about the politics of immersive theater, what it means to prefer individual experience over communal joining. And I thought of it again a few times during “Bottom of the Ocean,” at least when I wasn’t thinking of the jellyfish or whether the fire burning on the salver was maybe a little high or how to locate the emergency exit in the dark. But the aims of “Bottom of the Ocean” are strictly apolitical. The show instead privileges interiority and reflection over action, sending each participant on a private journey toward something like peace.Personally, the depths of my soul aren’t my favorite destination, but there is so much to enjoy along the way. Only two designers are credited — Laura Borys, who created the hallucinatory costumes, and the technical designer Howard Rigberg — but “Bottom of the Ocean” is a triumph of style and low-budget ingenuity, achieved through the simplest means: balloons, beans, wax, water. In the fewest square feet, it provides a sensory deluge. Each new room reveals a strange and distinctive environment.If I sometimes found the closeness uncomfortable (the closeness and the singing), discomfort is the trade-off for two hours spent in what can feel like a lucid dream. At the end I emerged, from one sort of warm, wet dark into another. My aura, if I had one, was definitively cleansed.Bottom of the OceanAt Gymnopedie, Brooklyn; boto.nyc. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Wes Jackson to Be the Next President of the Brooklyn Nonprofit BRIC

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      Wes Jackson, a music business entrepreneur, will lead the Brooklyn nonprofit arts organization beginning in July.Wes Jackson, a music business entrepreneur, will be the next president of BRIC, the nonprofit arts organization announced Tuesday. He will begin his new role July 18.He succeeds Kristina Newman-Scott, who led BRIC for three years, and guided it through the first year of the coronavirus pandemic before stepping down last August.BRIC presents cultural programming in Brooklyn. It is perhaps best known for its annual summer concert series, the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, at Prospect Park. This year, it includes free concerts by the reggae band Third World, the rapper Vic Mensa and the Nigerian Afropop artist Yemi Alade, as well as performances by the actor John Cameron Mitchell (“Hedwig and the Angry Inch”) and the comedian Bridget Everett (of HBO’s “Somebody Somewhere”).Jackson, 48, who serves as the director of a business program designed for professionals in the creative arts at Emerson College in Boston, began his career producing concerts for groups like the Dave Matthews Band and the Roots before starting his promotions company, Seven Heads Entertainment, which he later expanded into an independent record label and management company.In 2005, he founded the Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival, which has hosted performances by Jay-Z, Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar, and he has served as the event’s executive director for 15 years. “When you’re running a small shop, you’ve got your hands in everything,” Jackson said of leading the hip-hop festival. “Now I have people who can help, and I can dedicate my energy to thinking 10 to 20 years down the line, to turning Celebrate Brooklyn into something that rivals South by Southwest, Coachella.”BRIC, which has a 2022 budget of $16 million to $20 million, will present a bigger stage. Jackson’s predecessor, Newman-Scott, led the reimagining of the organization’s annual music festival as a virtual event in 2020, as well as the start of One Brooklyn TV, which broadcasts educational programming on weekdays during the school year in partnership with New York City’s Department of Education.Jackson said he wanted to continue to find ways to serve people in Brooklyn who may not be able to or want to gather in person, as well as those outside New York.“What we’ve learned through Covid is that now we’re national and international,” Jackson said. “There’s a tremendous upside to raising that level of educational play for an online audience.”Jackson, who grew up in the Bronx, earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Virginia and a master’s in Media Studies from the New School. He moved to Brooklyn about 25 years ago, where he has continued to live with his family while commuting to Boston. More

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      Paul Vance, Lyricist Behind an ‘Itsy Bitsy’ Bikini, Dies at 92

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      His daughter’s experience wearing a bikini on a beach in 1960 inspired him to write a novelty song that became a No. 1 hit.Paul Vance, who described the uncertain path of a girl in a risqué two-piece bathing suit as she advanced from a locker to the shore in the novelty hit song “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” died on May 30 in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 92.His daughter Paula Vance confirmed the death, at a nursing facility.It was Paula, who at 2 years old, inspired the song. On a family trip to the beach in 1960, she wore one of the itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot bikinis that her Aunt Lena had made for her and two of her cousins. But her shyness made her retreat, at first, because of the reaction of two boys who exclaimed that she was wearing no clothes.When she re-emerged, she wrapped herself in a blanket before venturing into the water. While in the water, the bottom of her bikini fell off. Heading home, the lyrics to “Itsy Bitsy” started coming to Mr. Vance. He called Lee Pockriss, his songwriting partner on a number of hits.“I sang the lyric on the phone and by the time he got to my office a couple of hours later, he had 90 percent of the tune written,” Mr. Vance was quoted as saying in the obituary for Mr. Pockriss in The Los Angeles Times in 2011.The song was soon recorded by Brian Hyland, a 16-year-old heartthrob from Queens, and it spent 15 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, including one week at No. 1. Before Mr. Hyland was introduced on “American Bandstand” — where a little girl would re-enact Paula Vance’s experience on a set with a bath house and mock waves — the host Dick Clark called “Itsy Bitsy” the “hottest or coolest record in the country, the biggest thing around.”“Itsy Bitsy” endured longer than its time on the charts, though. It has been covered dozens of times by artists as diverse as Connie Francis, Kermit and Miss Piggy, and Devo and used in commercials for products like Yoplait Light and Special K cereal.Joseph Philip Florio was born on Nov. 4, 1929, in Brooklyn to Philip and Concetta Florio. His father delivered ice in a horse-drawn wagon. His mother was a homemaker.He began writing lyrics when he was 13 but had no clear path to being a composer. He described himself to The Palm Beach Post in 2015 as a “dese, dose and dem” guy who avoided falling in with the Mafia. Instead, he served in the Army at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., then opened a junkyard and auto salvage business. He was already in his mid-20s when he met Mr. Pockriss, a composer who had done graduate work with Aaron Copland.“It’s an ideal professional combination,” Mr. Pockriss told The Associated Press in 1960, adding: “He understands the public. I understand the profession.”Their 1957 song “Catch a Falling Star” was a hit for Perry Como in 1957 and the first record certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America.Paul Vance in an undated photo with one of his gold record awards. He had a long career collaborating on songs recorded by Perry Como, Johnny Mathis, Paul Anka, Patti Page and others.via Vance familyThe success of “Catch a Falling Star” let Mr. Vance focus on songwriting, and he changed his name to sound less ethnic. With various collaborators, including Mr. Pockriss, he wrote songs originally recorded by Johnny Mathis, Paul Anka, Tommy James and the Shondells, and Patti Page.Mr. Vance cajoled Clint Holmes into recording his and Mr. Pockriss’s song “Playground in My Mind” by following him into a men’s room to make his pitch, at a venue in the Bahamas, where Mr. Holmes was performing. Speaking to The Palm Beach Post, Mr. Holmes said of Mr. Vance, “His enthusiasm struck me more than the song.” The song, though, became Mr. Holmes’s only top 10 hit.While still writing songs, Mr. Vance owned and bred horses for harness racing.In addition to his daughter Paula, he is survived by another daughter, Connie Vance Cohen; a son, Joseph; a sister, Joanne Florio, a singer; nine grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren. His wife, Margaret (Curte) Vance, died in 2012. His son Philip died in 2009.Mr. Vance was erroneously reported to have died in 2006 when the wife of a man named Paul Van Valkenburgh, who had indeed died, asserted that her husband had written “Itsy Bitsy” under the name Paul Vance. The obituary, by The Associated Press, was picked up by many news outlets, including The New York Times. (Corrections ensued, and The Times published a corrective article.)But the false report shook up Mr. Vance’s family and friends. His music publisher confirmed that Mr. Vance, not the deceased man, was the songwriter and that he was still collecting royalties.But as Mr. Vance told The Orlando Sentinel in 2006, some people still called thinking he was dead, and he would inform them: “This is Heaven. Who do you wish to speak to? Paul Vance? Oh, yeah, he just got up here.” More

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      BAM’s Next Wave Festival Returns With an Ivo Van Hove Production

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      The American premiere of the brutal play “A Little Life,” a drag-infused Hamlet and an immersive celestial installation highlight the festival’s latest iteration.The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s artistic director, David Binder, who is programming the 13 shows for the Next Wave Festival, is mixing “incredible light” and darkness, he said.It is the first in-person edition of the festival since 2019 and it will run from Sept. 28 to Dec. 22. The highlight will be the U.S. premiere of the stage adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel “A Little Life” (Oct. 20-29) — a coming-of-age tale about four young men that includes depictions of self-harm, domestic violence, child abuse and suicide.“There’s optimism and there’s things that speak to the challenging world we all live in,” Binder said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “So I think it relates to one piece of all of that mosaic.”Ivo van Hove’s production of Yanagihara’s Kirkus Prize-winning novel, which is set to be presented in Dutch with English supertitles at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, runs just over four hours and features a live video screen to show close-ups of agonizing moments, like a character burning his own arm — and pouring salt in the wound. (Yanagihara is the editor in chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.)“It’s an extraordinary production that challenges the audience,” said Binder, who saw the world premiere production in Amsterdam in 2018. “Much like the whole season.”Even though it’s long, he said, “I guarantee you it holds you every moment.”This is just the second Next Wave Festival that Binder, who started as BAM’s artistic director in 2018, has programmed, after the 2020 and 2021 events were canceled because of the pandemic. He told The New York Times in 2019 that his focus for the first event would “move it forward by adding in a whole new slew of artists,” and that emphasis continues this year, with 13 programs created in eight countries featuring dance, music and theater. Nine of the 13 artists and companies are performing at BAM for the first time.“That was our guiding principle,” he said this week, “to cover a lot of ground with lots of international new artists.”One of the returning artists is the German director Thomas Ostermeier, whose riotous production of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” will come to BAM’s Harvey Theater stage this fall (Oct. 27-Nov. 5). In Ostermeier’s staging, Ophelia and Gertrude are played by the same actor — as are many of the other characters; the play features just six performers. (The Guardian called the production of it in Berlin, which mixed pop music and drag shows with duels, “kookily funny and coolly self-aware.”)Next up at the Harvey will be the U.S. premiere of the Brazilian choreographer Lia Rodrigues’s carnivalesque dance piece “Encantado,” whose title refers to spirits of healing — the encantados — and which features 100 colored blankets that transform the stage (Nov. 8-9). Meanwhile, at the Howard Gilman Opera House, another dance piece, the Greek director-choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou’s dreamlike concoction “Transverse Orientation,” pairing experimental, painterly choreography with music by Vivaldi, will have its New York premiere, Nov. 7-11.Then the main stage shifts to opera with the U.S. premiere of Ong Keng Sen’s “Trojan Woman,” a queer Korean operatic take on the Greek tragedy (Nov. 18-19). The production, performed in Korean with English subtitles, fuses the traditional Korean musical storytelling form of pansori with K-pop music. (The “Parasite” composer Jung Jae-il composed the music in collaboration with the renowned Korean pansori master Ahn Sook-sun.)Binder also programmed work from within the United States, including an orchestral hip-hop performance by the Los Angeles producer and rapper Flying Lotus, the composer and D.J. Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Wordless Music Orchestra that is being billed as a rendition of their Hollywood Bowl performance in Los Angeles this summer (Oct. 6-7).The festival is set to wrap up with an immersive installation by the Brooklyn-based interactive-electronics artist Andrew Schneider, whose world premiere of “N O W I S W H E N W E A R E (the stars)” at BAM Fisher may be the closest a New Yorker will come to clear-sky stargazing (Nov. 29- Dec. 22). Visitors will enter a completely dark space and be guided by an unseen voice as 5,000 programmed points of light, which the artist has said are inspired by Yayoi Kusama’s “infinity” mirror room, respond to everyone individually.The season also features the American premiere of the Belgian theater collective FC Bergman’s wordless production of “300 el x 50 el x 30 el” (Sept. 28-Oct. 1), which follows the inhabitants of a small village fearful of an impending disaster. (The title refers to the dimensions of Noah’s Ark.) The Argentine choreographer Constanza Macras will showcase “Open for Everything,” which sheds light on contemporary Romany people, at the Harvey (Oct. 5-8). The Grammy-winning violinist Jennifer Koh and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines’s staged musical work “Everything Rises,” which seeks to “replace abstract slogans and inert diversity statements with lived experience and direct engagement,” will be at BAM Fisher (Oct. 12-15). More

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      ‘Hold Your Fire’ Review: Ending a Siege

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      A new documentary directed by Stefan Forbes centers on a 1973 hostage negotiation led by a police officer known for his pioneering techniques.“Hold Your Fire,” a new documentary directed by Stefan Forbes, centers on Harvey Schlossberg, a police officer whose pioneering negotiation techniques helped end one of the longest hostage sieges in the history of the New York City Police Department.In January 1973, an attempted robbery at a sporting goods store in Brooklyn quickly escalated, and the film suggests that Schlossberg’s intervention may have saved the lives of the four young Black men at the center of the conflict.Led by Shu’aib Raheem, the four young men planned to steal guns to arm themselves against attacks from Nation of Islam members, who had been targeting Sunni Muslims. The police assumed them to be part of the Black Liberation Army and surrounded the store, starting a 47-hour confrontation. Tensions increased after a shootout led to the death of an officer, leaving his colleagues eager for retribution.In the film, Schlossberg is presented as a savior who, with the support of Patrick Murphy, the police commissioner, turns the officers away from violence. But through interviews with lawyers, police officers, hostages and the men involved in the robbery, what emerges is a kaleidoscopic narrative that lays bare the disconnect between the officers and the communities they serve.Only after Black community members rise up in protest, in response to officers threatening to drive a tank into the store, are Schlossberg’s de-escalation tactics implemented. The film’s intention may have been to highlight the negotiator’s achievement, but it appears that it was public pressure, as much as his influence, that prevented more bloodshed.Hold Your FireNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Review: ‘A Song of Songs’ Makes a Sacrament of Remembrance

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      Grief for a lost love is the unhealed wound at the core of this play by Agnes Borinsky, which takes a disquieting turn into the underworld.A few sheets of colored tissue paper, weighted down by a trinket to keep them from fluttering off. This is what audience members find on their seats upon arrival at “A Song of Songs,” Agnes Borinsky’s new theater piece inspired by the biblical Song of Songs, and it’s something of a puzzle. What to do with them?The answer comes at the top of the show, when Borinsky — one of a cast of three in this production, staged in a former Roman Catholic church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — mimes instructions to us for a quick craft project. Following along, we form our sheaves into simple offerings for the altar in front of us. Then row by row, we walk up and place them there, in a shrine to the dead.It feels awkward and uncertain, stumbling through these prescribed motions of lamentation. But grief for a lost beloved turns out to be the unhealed wound at the aching core of “A Song of Songs.” We are, it appears, merely re-enacting it.Directed by Machel Ross and presented by the Bushwick Starr and the playwright Jeremy O. Harris, this play-as-ritual is meant as a kind of remix of the Song of Songs, which my Oxford World’s Classics edition of the King James Bible calls “notoriously, the one piece of erotic literature in the Bible.” But its carnality is drenched in joy, and in the comfort of lavished affection. Its verses revel in love and cherishing.So does “A Song of Songs,” at least at first. Though it’s too stylized to be sexy, its lovers, Nadine (Borinsky) and Sarah (Sekai Abeni), fall for each other in an all-consuming way, besotted to the point of unreason.“I took a pair of your gym shorts so I could smell them at work,” Sarah confesses, hiding her face. “This is completely terrifying.”Their fragmented story, and the loss of their transformative love, constitute the main narrative of “A Song of Songs.” Performed in brief scenes of monologue and dialogue, with occasional voice-overs and snatches of song, it makes a sacrament of remembrance. The set (by Frank Oliva, who also designed the lushly atmospheric lighting) takes full advantage of the architecture of a once-sacred space, and the actors’ flowing robes hint at religious garb. (Ross also designed the costumes.)Agnes Borinsky, Ching Valdes-Aran and Abeni. The set, by Frank Oliva, takes full advantage of the architecture of a once-sacred space.Luke OhlsonIn Sarah’s steady love for her only child, and Nadine’s abundant love for her many friends, Borinsky’s script considers more than just romantic attachment. Nadine’s godmother, Trudy (Ching Valdes-Aran), a revolutionary who loves with abandon, represents a fourth and more diffuse kind of passion: for society as a whole.Onstage at El Puente’s Williamsburg Leadership Center, Trudy’s is the most tentative thread of a production that does not entirely cohere. Patches of it can be hard to follow, and the acoustics sometimes swallow lines before they can land. Yet “A Song of Songs” possesses a surprising ritual power.As the play takes a disquieting turn into the underworld of Greek mythology, it stealthily leads each person in the audience toward a meditative consideration of their own mourning for those they have lost, to death or otherwise.The evening’s first participatory moment, when we placed our offerings on the altar, was preparing us for this: a second interlude when we are all asked to join in — wordlessly, each adding a token of love and sorrow to the set. (I’m not telling you what.) Delicately done, it is far more personal this time, and because of that, deeply affecting.“A Song of Songs” is a communal rite about the void left by the absence of people we love, and the universality of the pain that brings. More consolingly, it’s also about the beauty that can grow because of love, even if that love comes to grief.A Song of SongsThrough March 27 at El Puente’s Williamsburg Leadership Center, Brooklyn; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      BAM Taps Former Leader of Its Film Program as Its Next President

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      Gina Duncan, who had been working at the Sundance Institute since 2020, will return to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to lead it out of the pandemic.After a turbulent two years that has forced the Brooklyn Academy of Music to navigate the coronavirus pandemic, budget woes and leadership upheaval, the organization said Tuesday that it was turning to a veteran of its film wing to become its next president, filling a position that was left vacant more than 12 months ago.Gina Duncan, who previously served as BAM’s first vice president of film and strategic programming, has been selected as the organization’s new president, the institution announced. She will take over a multifaceted performing arts behemoth with a $50 million operating budget.Ms. Duncan, 41, who has never held the top job at an arts institution, will be tasked with stabilizing and reinvigorating BAM, an important cultural anchor and incubator known for presenting an eclectic array of cutting-edge artists and performers. Her first day as president will be April 11. She returns after a stint at the Sundance Institute, where she worked as its producing director.“Coming back to BAM feels like returning home,” Ms. Duncan said in a telephone interview. “The other day I went down to see Annie-B’s ‘The Mood Room.’ And it was the first time I had been back in BAM since we all fled our offices in March 2020. And I just was overwhelmed.”“I came back for BAM — the artists, the staff, the audience,” she added. “They’re my people.”The selection makes Ms. Duncan the first person of color to lead the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In choosing her, the academy’s board selected a candidate with whom they were familiar, after previously tapping an outsider in Katy Clark — a violinist-turned-arts-executive — who left BAM after less than six years in January 2021. Ms. Clark’s predecessor, Karen Brooks Hopkins, spent 16 years as BAM’s president, and a total of 36 years at the organization.Ms. Duncan joined BAM’s executive team in January 2017 as an associate vice president for film — a newly created role in which she oversaw the organization’s Rose Cinemas and its repertory film program. Under her leadership, BAM’s repertory programming began to focus more on underrepresented voices in cinema.She was promoted in 2019, with her role expanding beyond film to include responsibility for the organization’s archives and its lectures, classes and discussions; she helped integrate programming across the institution. She also helped move programs online during the early months of the pandemic, officials said.She left BAM in September of 2020 for the Sundance Institute, and now will return after roughly 18 months away.The chairwoman of BAM’s board, Nora Ann Wallace, said in an email that Ms. Duncan’s “leadership skills are immediately evident to anyone who works with her.”“Her ability to inspire a group of people — be it staff, audiences, donors, or our board — is vital to this moment in BAM’s history,” Ms. Wallace said. “The board saw those skills when she was at BAM in her previous leadership role.”Ms. Wallace noted that in addition to her background in film, Ms. Duncan has produced theater and arts-centered community programming for many years. “Gina is a gifted strategist who excels at assessing the bigger picture,” Ms. Wallace said.Ms. Duncan said that her vision for BAM involved ensuring it is “vital and visible across Brooklyn and beyond.” During her initial tenure with the institution, she said, she had worked to ensure that its film program both served local audiences and became part of a “larger national conversation.”“I see an opportunity to do that with BAM across all the different art and rich cultural programming that we present,” she said.When Ms. Duncan’s predecessor, Ms. Clark, left BAM, questions were raised about the housing bonus she had received to purchase an apartment in Brooklyn, which she was allowed to keep when she left the position.Ms. Wallace did not disclose Ms. Duncan’s salary, saying only that her pay is “in line with other performing arts organizations of similar size.” Ms. Duncan’s compensation does not include an apartment or housing allowance, Ms. Wallace said.Ms. Clark’s departure created something of a leadership vacuum at BAM; the board’s previous chairman, Adam Max, died in 2020 and an internal team was appointed to lead the institution temporarily as the pandemic created a crisis for the performing arts. With live performances impossible, BAM was forced to slash its operating budget, lay off some employees and furlough dozens more, cut the pay of top executives and dip into its $100 million endowment for special distributions.Ms. Duncan will have the advantage of taking over at a time when cultural institutions, including BAM, are starting to find their footing again. The academy’s first full season since the start of the pandemic focuses on the artists of New York City.“The industry remains really tenuous,” Ms. Duncan said. But at BAM, she said, she has a “strong foundation to start from.”“An institution is its people,” she said. More

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      With His New Album, 'Far In,' Helado Negro Confronts Earthly Anxieties

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      The Ecuadorean American musician’s new album, “Far In,” is filled with celestial lullabies that confront earthly anxieties.The end is weighing heavy on Helado Negro. Some of his unease stems from traditional concerns, like aging (the musician, born Roberto Carlos Lange, turned 41 this year). But some is a consequence of looming global catastrophes: the existential dread of climate change, the seemingly unending nature of the pandemic. “I know the world has always been in some kind of constant conflict and flux,” he said. “But it feels even heavier now.”Since 2009, Lange has crafted ambling, dreamlike music. Over six studio albums and five EPs, he has collaged lunar synths, tape loops and field recordings into gentle experimental compositions that meditate on immigrant identity, healing and tranquillity. In 2019, he received grants from United States Artists and the Foundation for Contemporary Artists, highlighting his immersive, multidisciplinary approach to performance, sound and visual art. “Far In,” his first album for the stalwart indie label 4AD, will bring his subtle hymns to what may be his largest audience yet on Friday.Chatting over a video call from Asheville, N.C. — where Lange and his wife, the artist Kristi Sword, moved this past summer after over a decade in Brooklyn — he offered a tour of his new home, the outside of which is painted sky blue. “I’ve been living in small apartments for 15 years,” Lange explained, as studio equipment rolled by: vintage synthesizers, an antique piano — the foundations of Helado Negro’s soothing, celestial lullabies.Lange’s first full-length album as Helado Negro, “Awe Owe,” blended some of the sounds of his South Florida upbringing into warm bilingual jams, weaving whimsical freak folk into mellow beats and melting marimbas. Since then, Lange, who is the son of Ecuadorean immigrants, has gone more electronic: The albums “Invisible Life” (2013) and “Double Youth” (2014) stitched robotic synths and tender melodies into looping, wandering flurries, not unlike Lange in conversation — he often interrupts one idea for another. On Twitter, he described the songs on “Far In” as “mind meanderings drawn in sound.”“I feel the most comfortable I’ve ever felt expressing through music,” Lange said of his new album, “Far In.”Jacob Biba for The New York TimesLange has spent his whole life daydreaming through film and music. When he was in middle school in the early ’90s, his older brother returned from a high school trip to Europe with a collection of techno, acid jazz and jungle compilations that jump started his obsession with electronic music. Once he got to high school, he would visit a record store in South Beach to buy Aphex Twin and Tortoise CDs for relatives in Georgia.That early exposure to electronic music “really flipped my brain,” Lange said. It led him to underground basement parties hosted by a pirate radio station in Miami, where he was hypnotized by ragga D.J.s and M.C.s. He started making beats and playing the guitar, recording himself on his brother’s computer, which had an early edition of Pro Tools.Lange eventually ended up in Georgia to study computer art and animation at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he took a class with a professor who introduced him to sound installation. “It just tweaked my brain even more,” he explained. “I was just like, ‘What is this? I want to make stuff like this.’”Lange’s profile rose in 2015 and 2016 with the release of the tracks “Young, Latin and Proud” and “It’s My Brown Skin,” smooth anthems of affirmation for many Latino listeners contending with xenophobia and racism during Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign and early days in office. On tour, after long and demanding performances, fans approached him and shared their own experiences. “It meant a lot to me,” Lange said. “A lot of it was really beautiful, but really hard.”On “Far In,” these themes are a little less literal. “I’m going to hold back from sharing a lot of my own traumas,” he said. “There’s an aspect of sharing experiences and, depending on how intense they are, some of them can make people complicit in your misery.”Lange was partially inspired by the 1991 science-fiction epic “Until the End of the World,” which almost became the title of the project. “I have a good relationship with movies that don’t hold your hand so much,” he said. “That’s why I like that Wim Wenders movie. It starts somewhere and it ends somewhere else.”Ed Horrox, the 4AD executive who signed Helado Negro to the label, said that Lange has a powerful ability to forge connections: “Whether it’s in person, whether it’s on a Zoom call, whether it’s a bloody three-line text,” he said in a video chat, “he’s got a knack for sharing warmth and positivity.” Horrox first found Lange’s work while searching for music to play on his London-based radio show, “Happy Death,” and followed him through the years. The response to Lange’s arrival on 4AD from listeners proclaiming him “my favorite artist” was “quite overwhelming,” Horrox said.The “Far In” standout “Outside the Outside” is a soft-focus disco groove with laser synths and thumping bass that’s an ode to the small pleasures of diasporic life: Its video is a montage of camcorder footage of house parties his family threw in the 1980s, when they would stay up dancing to salsa or merengue. “I used to wake up and it would be 7 in the morning and people would still be downstairs drinking,” Lange said with a laugh.“La Naranja,” a prayer for the apocalypse, arrives near the end of the album. “Y sé que sólo tú y yo/Podemos salvar el mundo,” Lange sings with a sunny glow. “And I know that only you and I/Can save the world.” “La Naranja” oozes radical hope, but many of the songs on “Far In” are also about confronting the end with a sense of presence, even with the knowledge that doom is near, like “Aguas Frías” and “Wind Conversations,” both inspired by the ecological drama of the Texas landscape. (Lange and Sword were in Marfa during the first months of the pandemic working on “Kite Symphony,” a multimedia project documenting the wind, sound and light of West Texas.)L’Rain, a Brooklyn-based experimentalist who played bass on three of the album’s songs, said softness surrounds Lange, both as a collaborator and vocalist. “It’s an intimacy that’s really immediate and really visceral,” she said in a phone interview. “When working with Roberto, on every level — from the way that he emails and the way he schedules rehearsals and talks to us about the music and asks us our opinions — you just feel respected and cared for,” she said.The intentions Lange set for the project have offered inner peace, too. “I feel the most comfortable I’ve ever felt expressing through music,” he said. “Sound and music has always been that for me: It’s always been that great place to enter into. That’s the best way that I’ve found myself to be a part of that idea — of being present within.” More