For over five decades, the Brooklyn Academy of Music has been setting an experimental agenda, giving over its stages to the likes of Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson. We spoke to Katy Clark, a former concert violinist who has been president of the academy since 2015, about encouraging risk-taking theatre, community building and ‘Bernie Sanders’ philanthropy.
On encouraging audiences to experiment
One of the great things about the BAM audiences is that they come to trust the umbrella brand of BAM. They know that whatever they come to see will be surprising, maybe shocking, may be provocative, may be very comforting but it will always be something. It’ll be something different. Some people often come and say they hated something and they’ll still come back. If you’re asking how we cultivated that over time, it’s a real combination of things – there’s the programming itself, which is very diverse. You’re not going to come and see the same classics over and over again. You’re going to see a lot of new forms. You’re going to see forms that are mashed up together. You’re going to see short form work. You’re going to see long work. You’re going to see work from different stages. There’s a lot of variety in the genre and the stages and the type of work that’s being produced and I think that’s very appealing. And we make it affordable. That’s not a small thing. A third of our tickets are under $35.
The other thing, which is less of a tangible thing, is that we’re unstuffy. We have a very welcoming vibe here at BAM. It’s a very eclectic feeling audience. A very chatty, talkative, curious audience and I think that’s partly because we’ve created an environment that feels welcoming.
On what it takes to impress her
At this point, it takes quite a lot because I’ve seen a lot. I think that it’s about fresh, progressive, independent-minded, forward-looking work. I’m always interested in seeing things that are from a different culture from the one that I grew up in. I came very much out of the music world... And so for me, it’s really interesting to step outside of that. To spend a lot of time looking at theatre and dance. The heart of it all is just great, great, great performances. That’s the thing that never changes. Two things I saw in the last week have been amazing. One was John Cale at BAM doing basically an incredibly invigorating playthrough of The Velvet Underground and Nico, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. He assembled a huge group of independent rock and alt rock musicians from a much younger generation to interpret this album.
On the same day, I went to the Metropolitan Opera and saw an opera called The Exterminating Angel by Thomas Adès, a British composer. And that was an absolutely stunning piece, and a new piece.
On building culture for the community
When Harvey Lichtenstein came to BAM in 1967, he was very determined that the artistic part of the institution would be different to anything that was happening in Manhattan. I still think that is at the heart of what BAM strives to be. When we started in 1861 Brooklyn was a city, and it behaves a little bit like a city now. Quite a lot of the audience comes from Brooklyn and we are the largest performing arts organisation in this huge city of 2.8 million.
We have a seniors’ cinema program. We have an enormous bazaar, every year around our DanceAfrica festival. We do a big annual celebration for Martin Luther King Day every year. We’ve been doing these things for a very long time, so you get to know your audience over time. Some of it is about making sure you’re listening to what the community needs. We can always be better at this. And as our neighbourhood changes very quickly, it’s incumbent upon us to keep moving these conversations along and saying, "do you need the same things?" The biggest challenge is making sure that you stay current with what is really useful to them, the multiple publics that we have here in Brooklyn. You have to recognise that there are good and bad things that come with rapid growth, and you have to be mindful that it’s not all good, it’s not all bad. We want to have a value of being inclusive. It’s a lot of sensitivity and a lot of listening.
On how technology changes arts programming
We're really aware now of what's going on all over the world in a way that we didn't used to be. There’s a tension between knowing everything and being able to curate that in one place. That's a kind of artistic challenge. I think a really interesting thing about performing arts organisations in the 21st century is that exquisite bond between the digital and the analogue. One of the really great and fun things about technology is trying to figure out how it enhances what artists do. We do this annual festival of radio, live radio, which is this great analogue-digital experience.
On finding the money
We’re always in competition for dollars. BAM is heavily reliant on private philanthropy. We have to raise up to 60% of our budget every year through private and government funded sources. That’s a lot, and the competition for those dollars is extremely intense. We have a lot of people giving small amounts of money. We’re like the Bernie Sanders version of philanthropy here.
On the current political climate
We’re in very polarised times in America politically, which I think is a different kind of challenge. One of the things that I've felt over the many years that I've been involved in the arts is that when the arts are not able to form part of the national conversation, in this country at least, they can be handled in much more local environments. You're looking at whole generations of children now that have graduated from school without comprehensive arts education. I think that there is a role that large performing arts organisations play in being ambassadors and advocates for what the role of the arts can be in society. Making that case becomes progressively harder when you feel like you don't have the same cultural support that the arts maybe used to have. It also makes it very satisfying work, being the people that really do talk about why this is important to society. In some ways, we’re taking the role of educators and politicians in doing that.
On transitioning from performance to management
When I was a performer, I was one of the kind of irritating performers that was always asking questions like "why are we here?" and "why are you playing this music?" and "why are you playing it with this person?" and "how much money are we spending?". I quickly realised that I could spend the rest of my career asking these questions or I could help answer those questions. I was maybe always destined to go into management. The thing about being a musician and transitioning to management is all those years of practice and training and auditions left me with a really abiding sense of how hard it is to be an artist, and how rigorous it is, how challenging it can be to keep doing it. That helps with having sympathy for the artist. Personally it means that I'm fairly disciplined and I'm very punctual because I was always turning up for rehearsal. The great thing about an orchestra, particularly is it’s a giant team of people, and it all happens because of each other's work and each other's creative input. An organisation like BAM is really, very similar. It's an enormous number of people. There are 244 staff members working with me to produce and present this work and make the institution great. I take the teamwork aspect of it very seriously, and enjoy that tremendously. I'm sure that has something to do with feeling like I'm part of a greater whole or a greater thing. We're stronger when we're together and do it all together.
Katy Clark will be speaking in Sydney on December 7 at Remix.
Lead image: Susan Marshall's Play/Pause at BAM in 2013