BAM’s Next Wave — I: Making Waves Together

BAM'S NEXT WAVE - I MAKING WA VES TOGETHER Gerald Rabkin Last fall's Next Wave Festival of the experimental performing arts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music was the third annual-and most ambitious -festival of that name: Eleven individual programs of various intersections of dance, theatre, music, and the visual arts were presented from October through December 1983. The festival has built upon BAM's admirable tradition of support for the advanced arts which dates back to Harvey Lichtenstein's rise to its leadership in the late '60s, a tradition which offered four of Robert Wilson's epics in the early '70s, housed the innovative Chelsea Theatre for most of its life, hosted the Living Theatre, Peter Brook's Center, and Grotowski's Theatre Lab, which has championed postmodern dancer/choreographers Laura Dean, Lucinda Childs, and Trisha Brown, and composers Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Glenn Branca -an honor roll by no means complete. After unsuccessful attempts at creating a classical repertory theatre on a British model, BAM has wisely decided to stick to its strong suit, and has worked to institutionalize its long-standing experimental tradition. As the Next Wave Festival has grown in scope and support (it is funded now by the massed acronyms of governmental agencies-NEA, NEH, NYSCA, DCA-and charitable trusts and major corporations like CIGNA and AT&T), it has increasingly viewed its function as disseminative and educational: not to introduce those young artists on the cutting edge of experimentation, but to leave that nurturing to smaller experimental venues like the Kitchen, Franklin Furnace, P.S. 1, and-yes-Danceteria and the Mudd Club. The Next Wave aims to use its economic muscle to take the next step, to commission and produce larger-scale work by established or on-the-brink experimental artists than is possible in the smaller spaces, and to arrange for 35 tours of some of that work, to extend the ripples of the Next Wave across the country. To facilitate a sympathetic reception for this work it has instituted a humanities appreciation program, and it will demonstrate the continuity of the avant-garde tradition by offering recreations of landmark experimental collaborations. Only the most elitist and proprietary of avant-garde enthusiasts will quarrel with these worthy ambitions. But, on the evidence of the work offered at the recent festival, certain questions rooted in these aims and larger than the success or failure of individual presentations suggest themselves. One is primarily aesthetic: what are the consequences-formally, thematically, theoretically-of the festival's commitment to large-scale collaborations between artists from different disciplines? Do these really represent the "next wave" in experimental art? Another is aesthetic, social-and controversial : Has the very success of the festival, its institutionalization, blunted an essential characteristic of the avant-garde tradition: its streak of rebellious iconoclasm? Historically, the avant-garde has often taken its derisive rejection by the dominant culture as its proud emblem: the Salon des Refus6s, the decadents, the fauves, the dadaists. Is the contemporary avant-garde now only formally, not socially, rebellious? Does its alliance with official and mass culture represent a decisive change in its adversarial tradition, a change which has led several critics to declare the end of the avant-garde itself, its subsumption by the world of fashion? (If there is one contemporary experimental group which sustains the avant-garde's lost capacity to create scandal it is the beleaguered Wooster Group. It has not been present at the festival.) I do not suggest that the work of the past festival will answer these questions definitively. I offer them not polemically but as suggestive theoretical issues which can ground and deepen traditional critical evaluations. The avant-garde, no less than traditional art, often succumbs to categorical subjective judgments which isolate the work of art as a discrete unit of consumption . But as Harold Rosenberg points out in The Tradition of the New: "In dealing with new things there is a question that precedes that of good or bad: 'What is it?'-the question of identity. To answer this question in such a way as to distinguish between a real novelty and a fake one is itself an evaluation, perhaps...