It’s become something of a magpie tradition to interview Bill Bragin at the start of a new season for The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi. In part that’s because he’s chatty and any interviewer likes an interview to flow, in part it’s because he’s an interesting guy. But mainly it’s because we’ve always seen The Arts Center as a kind of thermometer for the development of the contemporary performing arts scene in the UAE over the last ten years – it’s about pushing the envelope, widening access and building the community. The kind of shows Bragin puts on say a good deal about the role of an arts centre, but also about arts in the UAE in general.
“As we go into our second decade,” says Bill Bragin, Executive Artistic Director of The Arts Center since its inception, “what I’m really trying to think about is how we progress. It can be too easy to repeat the formula, so that it just feels like we’ve booked the same season yet again and just switched the names around. At the same time we need a sense of continuity, to build on the identity we’ve established and the kind of messages we’ve been putting across. We’ve been really trying to think about how we situate ourselves and how we speak to the broader community of the UAE.
“And I honestly feel that we’ve done a really good job in the bookings for the coming year.”
There are of course the familiar evenings for Hekayah | The Story and the global-sounds Tamaas Festival (this year with Yasmine Hamdan, Al-Qasar, and Maruja Limón). It looks like The Tasty Biscuits and friends could be a regular gig, too. But there’s noticeably more theatre this year – more on that later – and there’s a definite sense of looking to start interesting conversations about how performance can work, what it’s for, who it speaks to.
As an example, Bragin is keen to cite the recent Benji Reid work Find Your Eyes and Kid Koala’s Storyville Mosquito shows next year. “These feel like really nice bookends to the season, because they share some interesting DNA. They are for very different audiences, and they play out in really different ways. But from a formal standpoint, they both invite the audience to watch the piece as it’s being made. So at the same time you’re watching the process and you’re watching the end product. I like that.“
And at base Bragin (right) also likes work created in ways that he’s never seen before. “You can read the description of the piece and have no idea what it is, what happens, what it’s all about. But then you go to see it, and you get it right away. That’s what attracted me when I originally saw Benji’s piece. It’s the same with Kid Koala – and this is our third time working with him in person.”
In his eleventh year at the head of The Arts Center, it seems to be the unexpected that keeps him interested and committed. “If I was going to be self-critical, I would say that the early years of the Arts Center were definitely being programmed by a New Yorker who had moved to Abu Dhabi. Today, I don’t think that’s even a consideration. I mean, I am what I am: but Abu Dhabi has changed me, the Arts Center has changed me.” Bragin also credits curating collaboratively with Reem Allam, who he brought from Cairo’s DCAF Festival, for helping further situate the programming in the region.
Investing in the scene is another theme. “I think the way that we’re activating the programs, both within the university and in the community, has been quite impactful”. He cites the example of Benji Reid’s producer Michelle Rocha participating in a panel on arts management and touring with some key local names – Lisa Ball-Lechgar from ADMAF and the Abu Dhabi Festival, Khadija El Bennaoui from DCT Abu Dhabi, and Darine Alashy whose Abu Dhabi roles have included major contributions to Manar Abu Dhabi and the Public Art Biennial, as part of Off the Stage presented by Mubadala, The Arts Center’s educational and outreach series.
This kind of programme-related outreach sits alongside an increasing investment in local artists, a success story last year with 63Kolektib’s Metro Diaries and Hamour Doesn’t Leave the Cubicle from Reem Almenhali and Ahmed Almadloum (which was commissioned by ADMAF). “In the time I’ve been here, it’s clear that the artists who are making work in the UAE are making work that’s different from work that’s being made elsewhere. There is a noticeable trend for performance to come from the visual art field, a convergence of visual cultures. I think Benji and Kid Koala both speak to that. And then the stories that people are making, like Metro Diaries or Philip Rachid’s The Main Circle 7.83, are narratives about the UAE that the wider world should get to know and understand.
“it’s important for us here to create work that we present to ourselves, stories about the experience of us here and now. But the next step is surely to find a wider audience, and I’m thinking about how that transmission happens – probably by travelling to festivals and performing arts centres globally. How best can we advocate for our home-grown artists? That next step is a really inspiring goal, both for the art centre and for me personally.”
It’s already happening in a piecemeal fashion, of course. For instance ADMAF, the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation, has formal relationships with performing arts centres in other countries and has taken commissioned artists and performers on tour to them.
If the work is good enough it’s usually quite easy to find places to perform or to exhibit: the burdensome bit is the cost of getting there – flights, shipping costs, insurance – plus the hassle of visa bureaucracies and the like. Bragin says he would like to see some kind of export bureau for the arts, or maybe just a touring fund to support them.
After all, exporting the arts has proved really successful for cultural diplomacy and soft power for many countries. As he says, “The stories that our artists create would give the rest of the world a more nuanced picture of who we are and how we live. I would really love to see some of get out there, into the galleries and arts centres and festivals”.
He also points to the example of Factory International, which runs the biennial Manchester International Festival and commissioned Reid’s Find Your Eyes. Factory also has a purpose built cultural space (Aviva Studios) with a full arts centre programme embedded in its local community; and it tours work to partner venues and festivals around the world … including, of course, NYUAD Arts Center, which already has a relationship with Factory. Back in 2019 it was among a group of arts centres and festivals that co-commissioned a trilogy of dance pieces by the acclaimed American choreographer Trajal Harrell for the Manchester Festival.
The full list makes interesting reading: alongside The Arts Centre at NYU Abu Dhabi and Manchester International Festival were Schauspielhaus Zürich (a multi-location theatre), Onassis Stegi (a conference venue and performance space in Athens), Kampnagel (an arts centre in Hamburg), Holland Festival (three weeks of performing arts festival in Amsterdam), the Barbican arts centre and Dance Umbrella dance festival (both London), Berliner Festspiele (a number of arts festivals in Berlin), and NYU Skirball (aka Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan). Now that looks like a good basis for a regular collaborative arts touring endeavour …
Giving local artists the tools to build a professional career – which might well include seeking opportunities outside the country – is a related goal. That was the driver behind the Arts Center’s Numoo initiative, an intensive and practical programme that debuted in 2021 to foster and accelerate the growth of performing artists in the UAE. Sadly after three years Numoo lost its funding from the U.S. Mission to the UAE; “it is currently on pause because we’re in between funders” as Bragin delicately puts it.
Which is a shame, because he did see real value in the programme. “Part of the goal was to instil a sense of sort of DIY ethos, to help the artists to feel that they could take control of their own careers in a stronger way. And I’m really seeing how the Numoo artists are producing more themselves, doing more, touring or applying for grants and residencies. We’re also seeing more Numoo alumni artists’ works programmed in our own seasons.
“We asked one of our interns to do an analysis of all the artists we platformed last year. It turned out fully 60% of them were UAE residents. That confirmed what I was already feeling – that we were able to produce our 10th anniversary season with so many local performers and no sense at all that we had to compromise on quality… It just felt really relevant.
“So when we bring in artists from outside the UAE, I’m usually thinking about what they might have to offer an audience here – not just work that they might not have seen before, but also work that still speaks to them.
“Take Ahmed Al Attar’s The Discreet Charms of the Pillars of Society, which we will present in March next year. This is a Swedish production by an Egyptian theatermaker about a marriage between a Syrian woman and a Swedish man who wed during Covid. Her family has lived in and does business in Dubai. That feels like the kind of transnational, cosmopolitan relationship that will feel super familiar to most people in the UAE – and especially the trials of navigating familial bonds. How do you deal with in-laws who are very culturally different from you or your partner? It speaks to the sort of third-culture reality that is such a hallmark of both NYU Abu Dhabi and the UAE as a whole. It’s the kind of nuance that’s really relatable to us, and also important on a broader scale.” Indeed, nuance is sadly lacking in most political and social discourse around the world right now.
That might have fed in the upcoming season’s programming too. What do you want from your art when the world feels like it’s on the edge of falling apart? Bragin thinks that art (in the most general sense) can give you a way to process the madness and respond to it – maybe even deal with it. “And you also want to find a way to kind of celebrate life and celebrate all the things that make it worth living for. I think we’re trying to tap into that.” Later this month a Rwandan-Sri Lankan co-production, Dear Children, Sincerely…, comes to the Arts Center; it’s based on oral histories from those countries, prompted by interviews about the lessons that people would want to pass on to their grandkids about mistakes they have made. “We’re doing two public performances, but we’re also doing three performances for all of the first year students – it ties into the university’s Core Curriculum and our creative writing syllabus. It’s a piece that acknowledges the tragedies that took place both in Sri Lanka and Rwanda, but I think it also offers some paths forward. And I think it’s important that we see paths forward as well, you know?”
Shakespeare’s Othello is another production that excites Bragin, and it suggests another line of development that will keep him engaged for some time yet. “We have positioned ourselves very much as a contemporary performing arts centre. The question then is how does traditional or conventional performance fit it? How can we do classics like Shakespeare tragedies? Is there anything new to say about them? Seems there is. This production comes from the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town, and it is one of the best productions I’ve ever seen of a Shakespeare play. It’s beautifully acted, and it takes a very contemporary look at the work. Iago for instance is an Afrikaner. `some of the dialogue is in Afrikaans and Xhosa. It really heightens the conflicts and the subtexts, and it makes the core of the play really concrete. It’s just a really smart production. And very contemporary.
“There have been very few productions of Shakespeare in the UAE. In my early days [2015] we programmed Theatre Mitu’s very deconstructed piece that was scaffolded around Hamlet but wasn’t actually Hamlet … The Baxter Theatre’s Othello is the real thing, and the production makes the work feel really alive and not like fossilised heritage or archive. To me that’s really exciting.”
Offering this kind of access with a contemporary twist could also apply to the November concert with Ballaké Sissoko (kora) and Derek Gripper guitar). Derek Gripper is known for transcribing Malian choral music, so he understands the musical environment; but the result of the collaboration with Sissoko feels very like classical chamber music.
Another example: Kavan – An Ambedkarite Opera. Abhishek Majumdar, Arts Professor of Theater at NYUAD, with a group of ambedkarite performers who mix folk music from their Dalit community. “They’re also dealing with issues of caste, but calling it an opera gives it a frame – playing in those in-between spaces is one of the features that run through this year’s programme”.
So is the continuing support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, with the initial three-year partnership now renewed. As well as Find Your Eyes, Dance Reflections is sponsoring Ink – a new work by choreographer Huang Yi and audiovisual pioneer Ryoichi Kurokawa (who’s also shortlisted for the Richard Mille Prize) that explores the various texture between body, sound, visual, and space. The result is a work that merges analogue and digital, traditional practice and future design.
As always, the Arts Center’s programme is a genuinely eclectic mix. “Yeah, anything goes” says Bragin. “But I always have to ask, does it feel relevant? Why should this piece be here? I see a lot of work that I like, but which I feel doesn’t have enough to say to us here. If I can’t answer those questions, I can’t put it into the season.
“In general, the performances that make the final line-up all feel like they have a specific kind of resonance. Which might relate to past seasons – or it might be because I am also thinking towards future seasons and the sort of conversations that I’m hoping to have.
“I don’t think of the season’s performances in isolation. Yes, it needs to stand up if someone comes to only that one show. But I have to think on a longer scale. That’s why we announce our season as a season and not just as a collection of events.”
“When I talk to Maya Allison at the NYUAD Art Gallery about curation, I often think she’s curating in space and I’m curating in time. But there are always common questions: what do you first experience when you walk in the door? What happens next? How do you kind of create a conversation between the works that are immediately in front of you and those that are somewhere else – in another Art Gallery room, or in another Arts Center season.”
Be the first to comment