In Ever-Gentrifying Brooklyn, Can an Arts Complex Appeal to All?

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- When David Binder was asked to apply for the position of artistic director at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—a sprawling, three-theater arts complex with annual revenue of $50 million—he didn’t think he had a shot. “Who wouldn’t want it?” he says. But unlike colleagues up for the job, Binder hadn’t spent decades working in an arts institution.

Instead he’d worked as a producer of Broadway hits including Hedwig and the Angry Inch, organized the High Line festival (with David Bowie as curator), and guest-directed the London International Festival of Theatre.

But for a 158-year-old institution with 700,000 annual visitors and 260 employees, a fresh perspective was crucial. BAM is in the middle of an ambitious expansion, adding a visual arts space and updating its theaters, as it competes in an increasingly crowded field for New Yorkers’ time and money. The Shed, a $475 million multidisciplinary exhibition-performance space, opened at Hudson Yards this year, and the lionlike Lincoln Center—with its world-class venues for theater, dance, music, and opera—continues to be the city’s standard-bearer. So when Binder’s appointment was announced in February 2018, he was put in the position of charting a new, and everyone hoped unique, direction for BAM’s artistic future.

“To do this job, you have to have enormous cultural curiosity across just about every discipline,” says Katy Clark, BAM’s president. “One of the things that stood out about David was his ability to go across genres and be open-minded.” His assignment: Hew to the institution’s original mission to be the home “for adventurous artists, audiences, and ideas,” all while bringing stars and fresh talent to a local and international audience.

Binder started 18 months ago on a part-time basis, shadowing outgoing executive producer Joseph Melillo, who’d been there for 35 years. When BAM’s fall season kicks off on Oct. 15 with the Next Wave festival, Brooklynites, and anyone else, will get to see Binder’s vision in action. “I always want to find the widest audience for my work,” he says. The strategy is simple: variety. At Next Wave—co-sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies—Irish choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan will present his acclaimed 2016 interpretation of Swan Lake, an ebullient production that draws on Irish folklore; a month later the festival will premiere a theatrical version of The End of Eddy, a coming-of-age novel by Edouard Louis that scandalized France with its tales of poverty, homophobia, and bullying.

What that audience looks like, or should look like, is a trickier question. BAM’s mission prioritizes “engaging both global and local communities.” But even as it pursues diverse patrons with subsidized ticket sales, increased accessibility, and outreach programs, the surrounding community has gentrified.

Thirty years ago, Downtown Brooklyn and Fort Greene, BAM’s neighborhood, were predominantly low-income. (The latter was the backdrop of the 1986 Spike Lee film She’s Gotta Have It.) But in the past decade, in tandem with the Brooklyn Cultural District development project, luxury condominiums and rentals have sprung up around BAM’s campus. One new building in Fort Greene, 475 Clermont, has two-bedroom apartments that ask $5,995 a month; 230 Ashland, which will soon house the BAM Strong exhibition space, has a two-bedroom condominium listed at $1.4 million. “Of course it’s great to welcome new, affluent people to Brooklyn,” Clark says. “But that doesn’t change our aspiration to be a place for everyone.”

Binder’s solution is to present “the most exciting, adventurous artists who leave an impression on us long after we’ve experienced their work and who make us experience the world differently,” he says. That could involve Simon Stone’s contemporary rewrite of Euripides’ Medea, or a film series that explores contemporary Arab cinema, both of which might appeal to those who’d initially come to BAM for, say, Madonna’s Madame X tour, which runs through Oct. 12. “Hopefully, if you’re a theater person, you end up coming to see dance. Or maybe you’re a dance person, and you end up seeing film.

“We can speak to a lot of different audiences,” Binder adds. The trick is to get “different communities to be in the same room for the same things.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Gaddy at jgaddy@bloomberg.net, Chris Rovzar

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