How Did Mud Get Everywhere?
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- in Theater
A Show With a Cryptic Title but No Code to Crack
“300 el x 50 el x 30 el,” the Belgian troupe FC Bergman’s ambitious theatrical installation, will open BAM’s Next Wave festival with an elaborate set that recreates a rural settlement onstage.The Belgian theater collective FC Bergman was still young when it landed an invitation to a prestigious festival in its town, Antwerp, in 2011. “They said, ‘You have one evening — do something,’” Marie Vinck, a company member, recalled in a recent video conversation.The troupe members, who were finishing drama school, were thrilled — except that they had no money and no time. Still, in just a month, they hatched the sprawling “300 el x 50 el x 30 el,” an ambitious hybrid of theater, installation and live video, with an elaborate set that recreated a rural settlement onstage.“It was around Christmas time and we thought we could take the Christmas trees out of the streets to create this forest in the back of the theater,” Thomas Verstraeten, another member, said during the same Zoom conversation. “It was a very crazy experience, actually. We invited our friends to be onstage but also our parents, the father of a technician of ours,” he continued. “Marie’s old babysitter was in it. Because it was only once, they said, ‘OK, we’ll do it for free.’”From left: Thomas Verstraeten, Stef Aerts, Marie Vinck and Joé Agemans make up the theater collective FC Bergman.Paule JosepheDespite its abbreviated gestation, the show turned out to have legs: It has toured Europe, and this month will open the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival on Sept. 28 and run through Oct. 1. It will be FC Bergman’s U.S. debut.“It’s funny, it’s thought-provoking, it sprang from biblical sources, but it’s 100 percent contemporary,” David Binder, the artistic director of BAM, said of the show in a phone interview. “On one hand it’s pushing boundaries, and on the other hand it has a level of accessibility for everyone.” Well, not quite everyone. Binder quickly added that the evening is unsuitable for children.The cryptic title refers to the dimensions of Noah’s ark as described in the Bible, and the scale is appropriately awe-inspiring: The village that New York audiences will discover in “300 el x 50 el x 30 el” will accommodate a cast of 15, supplemented by scores of locally hired extras, live pigeons and, of course, that forest. “It’s one of our smaller shows, actually,” Stef Aerts, another company member, said, laughing.The collective’s productions have drawn comparisons to the physicality and transcendence found in the work of European superstars like Romeo Castellucci and Pina Bausch.Kurt Van der ElstAerts, 34, Verstraeten, 36, and Vinck, 39, were talking from Stockholm, shortly before a performance of their 2021 production “The Sheep Song,” a poetic fable about a sheep dissatisfied with its fate, at the Royal Dramatic Theater, once the home base of the Belgian troupe’s namesake, Ingmar Bergman. (Missing from the call was Joé Agemans, 40, also part of the collective. The other two founding members left in 2018.) FC Bergman regularly travels to the finest European houses and festivals, and since 2013 it has been a resident company at Antwerp’s municipal theater, Toneelhuis. The group doesn’t need to scavenge discarded goods for its sets anymore, leaving extra time for hatching new concepts.Indeed, while FC Bergman has tackled existing works, including an adaptation of William Gaddis’s novel “J R” and the Bizet opera “Les Pêcheurs de Perles,” it usually conceives its own, typically wordless, material. For “The Land of Nod” (2015), the collective set a show inspired by Jean-Luc Godard movies and Flemish masters in a custom-built, full-scale replica of the Rubens room at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, garnering comparisons to the physicality and transcendence found in the work of European superstars like Romeo Castellucci and Pina Bausch.As for “300 el x 50 el x 30 el,” the troupe drew from the aesthetics of the Scandinavian crime series that were becoming popular at the turn of the 2010s. “That was also the period when we discovered the work of the great Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson, who became a really big influence,” Aerts said, before mentioning “the other Scandinavian guy, Lars von Trier, and also, of course, the Catholic religion and lots of Flemish visual arts.”“It’s about people who are very much isolated in their mini-community,” Aerts said of the show, which uses live video to take audiences inside the homes of the villagers. Kurt Van der ElstRelatively little in this production happens in full view of audience members, who watch the proceedings via a live video feed. “It’s about people who are very much isolated in their mini-community — they live in the village but they don’t interact with each other, only in their little houses and with their little families,” Aerts said. “I think the use of the camera translates this feeling to the audience. You’re just presented the walls of locked houses, but you can peek through the keyhole.”This leaves viewers a lot of room to superimpose their own narratives and interpretations on the visuals. “We played in Greece in the middle of the Euro crisis and you felt that people saw the show as some kind of a metaphor for their situation,” Verstraeten said. “Now it will become something else. I love the idea that meaning is something that can change all the time.”The three company members also emphasized that there is no right or wrong way to read the show.“I hope that the audience permits itself to be very open and to not have the urge to analyze it or to find a key, to crack the code,” Aerts said. “You have to get underwater and let the performance flow over you.” More
- in Music
BAM’s Next Wave Festival Returns With an Ivo Van Hove Production
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
