BAM Announces Next Wave Festival Lineup
A French production of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychose, starring international film star Isabelle Huppert, and the U.S. premieres of Edward Hall’s all-male production of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale and German director Michael Thalheimer’s radical condensation of Emilia Galotti are among the highlights of BAM’s 2005 Next Wave Festival, which will run October 4-December 17. Sixteen separate engagements, including dance, opera, and music performances, will be featured in this years’ edition of the annual event.
The final play written by Kane, who committed suicide at the age of 28 in 1999, 4.48 Psychose is a harrowing work about mental anguish; Claude Regy, founder of the theater company Les Ateliers Contemporains, will direct the play, which will run October 19-30. Hall, director of the current Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, will return to BAM with his all-male troupe Propeller to present A Winter’s Tale, November 2-6. (Their production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a huge success at BAM last year.) Thalheimer, who has received numerous awards for his work in Europe, has reduced Emilia Galotti — an 18th-century play about a woman who compromises her virtue, with disastrous results — from four hours to 75 minutes. The production will run October 12-15.
Other theater-oriented offerings of the Festival will include Tall Horse, a collaboration between South African’s Handspring Puppet Company and Mali’s Sogolon Puppet Company (October 4-9); Bright Abyss, a performance piece created by French actor/acrobat James Thierree (November 9-13): Shelter, a music-theater spectacle written by composers Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe of Bang on a Can (November 16-19); and Super Vision, a new multimedia piece by the award-winning company The Builders Association (November 29-December 3).
Subscription tickets for the Next Wave Festival go on sale June 13; individual tickets be available as of September 6. For more information, phone 718-636-4100 or go to www.BAM.org.
