[opening music]
[onstage sounds]
[Joseph Melillo] I think that I'm the perfect audience member.
I enter the theater tabula rasa, with no bias,
I'm there to accept whatever the artists are doing
and I'm open to the exploration.
[background dialogue]
The biggest challenge in making new work is finding the resources to make the work
the way that the originating artist wants to make it.
The obvious financial resources, human resources, physical resources like
studio space, workshop space, and technological resources.
Those are the four needs that artists have in making work
and it's very challenging for them to put that all together to make a new work.
The program within the context of the Next Wave Festival is challenging
just by the nature of it being contemporary, non-traditional, progressive, and innovative work
not only from artists within our own New York City community
or the United States, but also from the global community.
These are discoveries for our audiences.
People have never seen these works of art.
There are all New York premieres within the Next Wave Festival.
[speaking in English and Spanish]
[Liza McNulty] When I first took this job,
I started thinking about what it means to be a "gender-focused theater,"
and then I started to think about what it means to be an "identity-focused theater,"
and I started to realize that there wasn't a single identity-focused theater
that hadn't actually had significant struggles,
that hadn't really had to fight for its place in a big way.
I think people think when they hear a theater
devoted to women and female-identified artists,
they think the work is domestic,
they think it's not funny, they think
it's not entertaining, they think maybe
it's about a sad lady with a problem, and
I think that there is work like that exists that's beautiful that I've produced
and that I want to continue to produce,
and then there's all kinds of other work.
That seems to me to be the biggest difference and challenge in our programming.
People think they know who we are,
people think they know what we do, but they don't.
We make amazing work by amazing artists.
They're not women artists, they're not female-identified artists,
at the end of the day they're artists!
The biggest challenge for this theater, and I guarantee any theater is money
I think the strength of my institution is that we're nimble,
we're able to be responsive to our artists.
We don't have a lot of money, but we have a great willingness
and ability to shift to suit the work.
Last fall, we did a play by Sarah Ruhl called Dear Elizabeth,
and Sarah and I talked about, well,
A) what does this play need, what does this
moment need, how do we tell this story in
the best way possible, and we decided
then we were going to present the play
with a new cast every week.
We just felt like that was the way to put the focus on the text
in the way that the play really required
and a way to create a sense of event around the play.
And that felt like we just sort of decided it and
then we put it into motion because we're
small and we're scrappy and we can figure it out.
I've worked at larger institutions, and there are so many strengths.
There are so many exciting things about having so many resources to bring to the table,
but sometimes, it's harder to have that kind of nimbleness
in response to an artist and an artist's needs.
[Melillo] Artistic programming here at BAM,
is done with that science called research.
The Internet has allowed me to do a lot of research about artists
and productions all over the country and the world
that I'm interested in knowing if it's possible to program
for BAM's artistic seasons.
With the Next Wave Festival, I'm looking for progressive,
innovative ideas regarding its content.
[music]
The production values have to be of extraordinary level of sophistication
[music]
and it has to be successful.
[McNulty] My process for choosing plays is pretty instinctual.
I think you have to have in your head what's good for the institution,
you have to have in your head what's good for the field,
but at the end of the day if you don't in your gut deeply love a piece of work,
you can't and shouldn't produce it.
I really reject the idea of having a kind of thematic control over the work.
It seems to me that my role is to show the spectrum of work.
So, I suppose when I think about the season,
I think about, "is there a really early career artist?
Is there really an artist whose much further along,
sort of further along in their career, more established?
Is there diversity in the season?"
So I suppose that's the story I'm trying to tell
rather than through the actual mechanism of the work,
rather instead who are the artists
and what's interesting that they're making right now.
[Melillo] BAM is the oldest continually operating performing arts center
in the United States of America.
The corporation goes back to 1861
when Brooklyn was a separate city.
There was no bridges, no tunnels between the island of Brooklyn
and the island of Manhattan,
and the men and women of that time who lived in the city of Brooklyn
wanted art and culture in their lives. They built the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
It opened in 1861 and was in Brooklyn Heights.
That building was made out of wood and regretfully burned down in 1904,
and so we opened our doors here at 30 Lafayette Avenue
in 1908 and have been working consistently
to present performing arts here at this location.
In 1983, the man who was the president and executive producer of BAM,
Harvey Liechtenstein, had the concept of
giving New York City its first contemporary performing arts festival.
He wanted to dedicate his institution to the creation of a
contemporary performing arts festival.
When Harvey hired me, he says,
"Joe, I don't want you to create an empire,
I want the Next Wave Festival to be a living, organic
part of the institution called BAM."
I was like any other producer being asked
to come in and do a job, do a gig.
I thought I was going to produce one festival for the institution,
and then we would finish, and then I go up and look at another opportunity professionally,
but Harvey said, "Oh no, no!
We have the money to do three!"
What evolved organically is that the Next Wave Festival
came to be all of the artistic work that the institution does in the autumn of each year.
[music]
[McNulty] WP Theatre was formed in 1978 by Julia Miles.
She was a producer at the American Place Theatre at the time
and it was right at the middle of the feminist movement
and she started to look around
and started to become aware that she was making lots of work at the American Place Theatre
but not very much of it was written or directed by women
and she started to do some snooping and found out
that only six percent of the work being done was by women.
And so because Julia is a person who makes things happen,
she decided she was going to do something about it.
She gathered a group of female identified artists that she was really excited by:
Kathleen Chalfant, Thorne, Claudia Weill, Melanie Joseph...
There were a number of people who at the beginning gathered together
because they just didn't have a place to develop their work, to make work,
and Julia provided that home for them.
[Melillo] In 1984, we assembled, reconstructed, Einstein and the Beach,
which I couldn't do for the first Next Wave Festival in '83,
but I did deliver in 1984 for the second Next Wave Festival
BAM would always be interested
if a great director was going to tackle
an important work for the theater
and it was a durational work of many hours.
We would be the place where they would be
interested in housing their work.
[dialogue]
In 1987, we opened The Mahabharata at the Majestic Theatre.
Peter Brook needed a theater for the production
and it was because of The Mahabharata that we found
the Majestic Theatre, which is now called
the BAM Harvey Theater,
and the interior of that theater has a unique design:
it's based upon Peter Brooks's theatre in Paris called the Bouffes du Nord.
And so, there is no other theater in North or South America like the Harvey Theater.
[McNulty] When I first got this job, I was up visiting friends,
and completely randomly, a playwright friend was also friends with those folks
and came up to visit, and it's a playwright who I've always wanted to work with:
Tanya Barfield. And she came up and she had this play
that I've been really excited about called Bright Half Life
and I walked with her around the little pond on the property
and I just turned to her and I said, "How would you like to do a play?"
And we did! And just the sort of synchronicity of that moment
to suddenly come back to this institution that had meant so much to me
throughout my career.
To have this writer just happen to come up to where I was,
who's a writer I'd always wanted to work with,
who had a play that I'd always wanted to produce,
and just be able to turn to her and go "hey, let's make something"
feels to me like the biggest privilege of my job.
I try to present work that's in its most complete form.
I try to serve the artists in that way so that they can be presenting work that's really ready for an audience,
so that an audience can really receive it.
I think audiences have an appetite.
I think they have a bigger appetite than folks give them credit for.
I am always excited, but when this institution can...
surprise people with what what they respond to.
[music]
[Melillo] My gratifying moment is what everyone knows about me,
is the opening night.
When the curtain goes up on an artistic work of this institution
that I've made the choice, I've been working with the team here at BAM
to support that artist, to make the work happen,
and we all work to make that opening night happen.
[singing]
[applause]