The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2021 season will feature a mix of outdoor and public art performances – including concerts for individual viewers – as well as virtual lectures and music, the organization said on Thursday.
While the season is being cut back significantly from the Academy’s usual program, its presence is expanding across Brooklyn. And it’s just another addition to the growing number of live art events slated to take place in New York City more than a year after the coronavirus pandemic closed the city.
In a press release, academy officials said a large public art installation entitled “Arrivals + Departures” would adorn the front of Brooklyn Borough Hall starting Sunday.
“Influences,” contemporary dance on ice skates, will arrive at the LeFrak Center on Lakeside in Prospect Park in April, and some of New York’s notable musicians will be bringing the Brooklyn Navy intimate “1: 1 CONCERTS” curated by Silkroad Court off May. There will also be a pop-up magazine event on the sidewalks of Fort Greene in June.
Later that summer, Aleshea Harris’s “What You Send Up When It Goes Down” will be presented at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in coordination with Playwrights Horizons. Originally presented by the Movement Theater Company, the play, which Harris described as a ritual, dance party and “a space in the theater that is unrepentant for and about blacks”, was celebrated off Broadway in 2018.
Live virtual events include “Word. Sound. Achievement. “- a hip-hop and spoken word concert – in April and” DanceAfrica “, an African and African-diasporic dance festival in May. Virtual literary talks are also held during spring and summer.
“We have put together a season that will turn some of Brooklyn’s most popular and iconic locations into breathtaking stages,” BAM artistic director David Binder said in a statement. The programmed artists, he added, “have hit the moment and are presenting work in surprising and exciting ways.”
The BAM announcement comes as live performances find their way back onto the city stages, including those that have been redesigned to keep performers and viewers safe.
Last month, the Javits Center hosted the first in a series of “NY PopsUp” concerts that are part of a broader public-private partnership aimed at revitalizing the arts in the state. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has called for an Open Culture program for the city that will allow outdoor performances on designated streets of the city in the spring.
Lincoln Center also announced a major initiative known as Restart Stages, which will begin in April with performances in 10 outdoor performance and rehearsal rooms. And last week, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo said that plays, concerts and other performances in New York could resume as early as next month with capacity restrictions.
