The Brooklyn Academy of Music will welcome its 42nd Next Wave festival this fall, with most works created by female artists, the performing arts center announced on Thursday.
“We led with women,” said Amy Cassello, who became BAM’s artistic director last year after serving in the role as interim. “It just felt like a good time to center women creatives.”
The announcement comes at a time of leadership flux for the academy and financial fragility that was intensified by the pandemic. BAM’s staff has declined by more than a third in recent years, and its nearly $52 million operating budget is smaller than it was 10 years ago.
But there is momentum, and audiences are growing.
Next Wave will have 11 events, as it did last year, up from eight in 2023. That year, the festival scaled back to nearly half of the 2022 offerings amid staff layoffs.
“I feel confident that we have the number of shows that make a coherent statement,” Cassello said, adding, “I wish there were more money to subsidize and support and invest in artistic work.”
The festival opens with the choreographer Nora Chipaumire’s “Dambudzo” (Oct. 8-9), a blend of painting, sculpture, sound and performance, transforming the nearby performing arts space Roulette into a Zimbabwean house bar.
The lineup also includes the French director Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s “LACRIMA” (Oct. 22, 24-26), a choral theater performance that, in a dark look at the fashion industry, traces the many hands across the world it takes to create a wedding dress for a British princess; Eiko Otake and Wen Hui’s “What Is War” (Oct. 21-25), a fusion of movement and video testimony about war and its aftermath on collective memory and the body; and the choreographer Leslie Cuyjet’s “For All Your Life” (Dec. 3-7), a solo performance interrogating the life insurance industry’s ties to slavery.
Next season will also feature a revival of Richard Move’s dance-theater work “Martha@BAM — The 1963 Interview” (Oct. 28 -Nov. 1), in which Move recreates a 1963 interview between Martha Graham (Move) and the critic Walter Terry (the playwright Lisa Kron) at the 92nd Street Y.
BAM will also present a screening of “The Mahabharata” (Sept. 18), a film adaptation of Peter Brook’s nine-hour theatrical presentation of the Sanskrit epic that BAM staged in 1987 atthe theater now known as the Harvey Theater at BAM Strong. The Harvey will be the site of the screening of Brook’s (much shorter) 1989 film, newly restored by his son, Simon Brook.
The season concludes with a revival of the raucous post-rock opera “What to Wear” (Jan. 15-17) by the avant-garde theater maker Richard Foreman, who died in January at 87. The hallucinatory work, with a score by Michael Gordon, will be conducted by Alan Pierson and directed by Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson, and run as part of Prototype, the experimental New York opera festival.
“BAM has always been artist-centered and adventurous and risk-taking,” Cassello said, “and I think that’s absolutely necessary. Always has been.”
Rachel Sherman reports on culture and the arts for The Times.
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