Past, present and progress: the new Arts Center season

The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi has announced its tenth season, featuring more than 30 artists and a total of 55 performances.

It’s the kind of eclectic and genuinely impressive mix that we’ve come to expect from Bill Bragin and his team – a couple of well-regarded returners and several UAE debuts, some internationally known names and some locally grown projects, two world premieres, crowd-pleasers and boundary-pushers. As we’ve said so many times before, it’s exactly the kind of programming that an arts centre really ought to be doing.

There’s a theme for the 10th anniversary season, ‘looking back and looking forward’. This seems explicit enough – the programming includes some returners and some new performances – but it’s not a deeply thought out direction for the schedule. As Executive Artistic Director (and founder) of The Arts Center Bill Bragin noted: “We don’t really programme to a theme. We look at the shows and the artists that we want to bring, and then a theme emerges.”

Maybe though, for the 10th anniversary some more deliberation was required. It might be an arbitrary watershed, but ten years still feels like a good time to take stock. Bragin says he and his team were keen to invite some artists back, to reflect on the past and progress, while at the same time they were keen not to repeat themselves: “we really didn’t want to get caught up in a programme that felt redundant, that felt like we were just repeating ourselves.

“But that’s always something that you have to balance as a curator. You may have built a great relationship with some artists, you love their work, they’re great to work with, they engage in the community really well. So you want to bring them back, you know that they’re going to deliver.

“Equally you want every season to also feel different, and you want the audience to get that sense of surprise and delight as they look at the schedule.”

That’s a trick The Arts Center has managed pretty well. Season after season the programming has featured names that many people would not recognise; the sense of discovery should always be a key part of any arts centre’s rationale. But once the discovery has been made, and once the audience has made the connection, it makes sense to invite the likes of Hervé Koubi or Maysoon Zayid to return – with new material, of course, but with their characteristic style of delivery. “People understand what it means for the Hervé Koubi company to be coming back to open the season, and it has a different kind of weight …”

Koubi’s Sol Invictus is presented with the support of Van Cleef & Arpels’ Dance Reflections initiative, and that relationship looks like it’s working well. Says Bragin: “We feed on each other. There’s a really nice dialogue, curator to curator, between me and with Serge [Laurent, director of the Dance Reflections programme]. For instance, the Tricia Brown Company figured in our second season. That was our programming, but for this season it was Serge Laurent who proposed that we bring the company back to Abu Dhabi with a couple of pieces, one an older archival work but also one new dance choreographed by Noé Soulier – who had been brought to us by Dance Reflections last year.”

The other standout for us was the extra theatre programming in the Fall season. Said Bragin: “We’ve become aware that theatre is such an important part of the university. Up to now we’ve done a number of devised theatre and performance art pieces, but we haven’t presented a lot of scripted theatre. This year Reem Allan, who joined in our 9th Season, has come on board to do the season planning with me, and her background is in theatre, so we’ve had a lot of conversations about theatre, especially in terms both of what’s happening regionally and in the Arab world in general.

“So Arabic language theatre is something that we want to highlight. But we are also concerned to present the kind of smaller-scale theatre in which local theatre makers and our students can find inspiration.”

He mentions Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz, a heroic eight-hour performance of the complete Great Gatsby which he programmed in The Arts Center’s third season. That kind of extreme demonstration of the possibilities of theatre is the kind of thing that only arts centres can do, because it’s a massive, risky, boundary-defining work. But it’s not something that most theatre artists would be able to contemplate, especially those based here.

By contrast, Chrystèle Khodr’s Augures will demonstrate what can be done with minimal theatre – two good actors, a great script and great direction in a simple room with minimal props can be just as transformative as the eight-hour epic. Bragin says the team is finding more possibilities in stripped-back; “there are more projects brewing as we look forward …”

So it’s a time for anticipation and far-sightedness, but also a time for reflecting on the past. And after 10 years, what would the Bill Bragin of today say to Bill Bragin of 10 years ago?

“Well, I think he’d probably say ‘congratulations’. And I think he’d probably be surprised that Bill Bragin is still here today. I quite intentionally didn’t arrive with an expiration date – I came with the idea that I wanted to build an institution that would last. Ten years on, I feel we are at a place where what we do and why we do has become really established.

“Maybe the most unexpected development that I can only really understand now is our impact on artists based here, giving them tools and ideas and opportunities to create their own work – we started to create a feedback loop.

“Look at Reem Almenhali: she studied at NYUAD and was in the Arts Center audience a lot. She was part of Hekayah. Then she and Joanna Settle created Al Raheel, which we presented twice. And now she’s directing Ahmed Almadloum’s Hamour Doesn’t Leave the Cubicle for The Arts Center, part of a new contemporary Emirati theatre.

“I think that the Bill Bragin of ten years ago would be really delighted by that”.

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---