Joy to the world: The Arts Center’s new season

fanfarai — Fanfaraï, part of a double bill with Dirty Dozen Brass Band on 5 September (sold out, but there may be returns)

Bill Bragin is back from Edinburgh. He saw 45 shows there in two weeks (he says he’s slowing down – a few years ago he was managing 8 or 9 per day). It’s partly pleasure, partly work; on his visit there last year he saw The Butterfly That Flew Into the Rave, and he’s booked that show for The Arts Center (10 to 12 September, and selling fast). This year? “I saw four, maybe five, that sparked varying degrees of interest …”

They’ll be noted as possibles for future seasons, but they’ll have to justify their presence.

The press release for The Arts Center’s 2026-27 season talks about the programme being “rooted in a belief that live performance can inspire a kind of collective effervescence, harnessing the energy of a community and transforming it to something even bigger”. Maybe that’s something to which any arts centre and any arts programming would aspire, engaging the audience to create something greater than the sum of its parts. And after more than a decade of new-season programming (and new-season press releases) you might think it would be getting harder to articulate a specific theme for each new year. But perhaps that’s one of the skills of running an arts centre which doesn’t make it into the official job description.

At a practical level, ‘more of the same’ wouldn’t be a bad goal for the new season – it’s hard to find any duds in The Arts Center’s 11 seasons, certainly nothing that goes against the ‘Come Curious, Leave Inspired’ tagline adopted a few years ago. And Bill Bragin (right), who’s been responsible for each of those 11 as Executive Artistic Director, says he always had a profound belief in the importance of a group of people gathering together with an artist to create a shared experience.

But it’s equally important both to reflect the way things are, and to have a sense of direction. “Last year’s programming was very hard-hitting, the quality was great, and it was very well received by our audiences. I addressed some very heavy issues, the way art can contribute to difficult conversations.

“But that can’t be the only mode we operate in. Having a place where you can express joy and resilience amidst difficult times is also really important. We wanted to lean into that this year.”

The press release quotes him as saying the upcoming season “is filled with an expansive sense of joy, not as escape or distraction, but as a tool to enable release, resilience, and community in uncertain times”. He expands on this: “The season’s shows are grounded in a sense of community celebration, and there’s a real pleasure in that – but it’s not just escapism. These shows offer joy that is really functional, joy that helps give you the inspiration to keep going. We were very conscious that this season should leave people with a sense of hope and inspiration.”

So that’s the starting point before Bragin and his team went looking for artists that would fit? Well, it seems a bit more pragmatic than that. Or maybe it’s more subconscious. “I don’t necessarily start with a theme, but initially we’ll have a list of a few artists and performances that for one reason or another we’d like to have at The Arts Center. But once we start doing some programming, I’ll start to realise what’s on my mind. Then the rest of the bookings are built around that.

“Take Camille Brown’s I AM [21 January]. It’s a dance piece that is very explicitly about Black joy, right? And in a very different way, The Butterfly Who Flew Into the Rave is also about joy, a three-day rave distilled into a one-hour performance that’s all about the ecstatic release that happens on the dance floor. A full-on experience that’s about release when you need it.

“The Dirty Dozen Brass Band [5 September] comes from the New Orleans brass band funeral tradition, but it’s not about death – it’s about the transformation of grief, and when the band kicks into the funky double time Second Line rhythms it’s about the celebration of life. Celebrating everything that’s worth living for, while also sort of celebrating the way the departed are moving on to better places.”

The Arts Center has always been grounded in the academic life of the university, for instance with departmental collaborations, and artist workshops for students as well as the broader public. First-year students are getting a private Dirty Dozen Brass Band performance, with a conversation to follow that grounds the work in the cultural and historical issues that underlie New Orleans brass band music. “It’s important for students to realise that The Arts Center is a home for them – it’s setting the tone of our relationship with them for the next four years. And on the academic side, NYUAD’s Core Curriculum is sponsoring that show with us, and it will be required for all the first year students.”

The danger with this kind of programming, which brings fresh ideas and novel technical skills from the world to Abu Dhabi, is that local talent is easily overlooked: there are so few performance slots available, so many possibilities for filling them. Bill Bragin is keenly aware of this, and The Arts Center has generally managed a decent balance. In his time at Abu Dhabi, the opportunities for creativity and professionalism in delivery have increased massively, thanks in no small part to Arts Center commissions and programming: and in particular Bragin says he’s increasingly thinking about how local artists can play a role in its seasons.

In practice they’re not going to offer only the extravagant high-concept high-tech shows that depend financially on deep-pocketed commissioners and multiple performances from tours. “So one of the things Reem [Allam, Associate Director of Artistic Planning] and I have been talking about since she started is the importance of bringing in some smaller scale work, equal in artistry but more modest in terms of production values. That sets an example for local artists about what could be possible and the kind of work that they could make.”

He cites two examples from this season. Youness Atbane’s Untitled 14km (1-2 October) sits somewhere between theatre, dance, and art installation. And local artist Afra Al Dhaheri is collaborating with the Lithuanian contemporary choreographer Dovydas Strimaitis on Knots, a dance-meets-installation performance co-commissioned by The Arts Center(22-23 May).

But Bragin is also able to find local solutions at scale, specifically on 8 April for Trees, a commission from documentary filmmaker Sam Green. “Caroline Shaw, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, has written the music for it – and it’s an orchestral score. In the past, I’ve had to turn down orchestral projects because there was no professional orchestra in the UAE. But that’s changed now, and over the past year we’ve developed a really robust relationship with the UAE National Orchestra. They performed four times at the Arts Center last season, their first, and for Trees they will provide the ensemble accompaniment. It’s the first time that I’ve proposed to the UAENO a project that really is steeped in The Arts Center’s aesthetic world.

“In the changing landscape that is the UAE’s arts and culture ecosystem, the introduction of the National Orchestra and what it has allowed us to do curatorially is really fantastic.”

So, changing times. “Once we were the only kid on the block when it came to arts programming, or at least one of very few. Apart from the established festivals like ADMAF’s Abu Dhabi Festival, there wasn’t much going on on a regular basis; and that allowed us to introduce our vision and our approach. But now there’s so much more for the audiences – the museums, the Cultural Foundation, Saadiyat Nights has started, there are more commercial activities.”

This has allowed The Arts Center to refine its offering, its point of view: it no longer has to try to be everything to everyone all of the time. “Over these years we’ve built a lot of trust, which we try to encapsulate in ‘Come Curious. Leave Inspired’. Even though the audience has so many more choices now, we’re still getting solid audiences. It speaks to the fact that there’s still a hunger for what we’re doing …”