The Industry Award

Joe Melillo, Brooklyn Academy of Music
During the off-season, executive producer Joe Melillo leaves his office and becomes a globe-trotter, seeking out provocative, contemporary artistic treasures for the Fort Greene stages of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Manhattan audiences happily crossed the river this year to see dance from China, Germany, Brazil, and Israel, and to hear the outer-space-inspired vocalizing of NASA’s erstwhile artist-in-residence Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass’s latest symphony, and the Brazilian pop sensation Daniela Mercury. BAM’s devotion to hometown talent was also evident in a three-year commissioning project with Bang on a Can composers Julia Wolfe, David Gordon, and Michael Lang, resulting in some stirring multimedia-music-theater collaborations. Choreographer Mark Morris, who set up shop across the street four years ago, is an annual presence, and dancer-choreographer Wally Cardona made his bam debut this month, with a stage full of four-foot-high, precariously balanced posts and a theater full of boom boxes. (Cardona says that when he was asked to create a piece for the 2005 Next Wave Festival, he was so blown away that he didn’t believe Melillo at first.) The Next Wave Festival paved the way for the Lincoln Center Festival, which began thirteen years later, in 1996, and nicely picks up the slack during the quiet summer months.
—A.Z.

Related:

• Articles by Peter G. Davis
• Table of Contents: December 19, 2005 issue of New York | Subscribe!