Bam : the complete works /

TWENTY-FIVE years ago my husband and I moved to Brooklyn, lured by the promise of more space than we could afford in Manhattan. We loved our big, sunny apartment and its proximity to Prospect Park, but if we wanted to eat in a restaurant that was not a pizzeria, or see a movie whose protagonist was not a superhero, we had to return to our old neighborhood, the Village. In this cultural desert there was one astonishing oasis. The Brooklyn Academy of Music was presenting "The Gospel at Colonus," in which Sophocles met soul music; dance performances by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane company and Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal; and a revival of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's "Einstein on the Beach." The Next Wave Festival, its poster designed by Roy Lichtenstein, had recently begun. There was Twyla Tharp, and the Kronos Quartet, and John Adams's opera "Nixon in China," and, astonishingly, in 1987, the English-language version of Peter Brook's nine-hour "Mahabharata." On that rundown block off Flatbush Avenue stood Brooklyn's future as New York City's Left Bank. Newcomers know BAM - the acronym, first used in 1973, replaced "the academy," which tells you what was happening - only since the renaissance that began when Harvey Lichtenstein arrived as director in 1967. But the institution's history is far longer; at 150 years, it is the oldest performing, arts center in America. BAM: The Complete Works, edited by Steven Serafin (Brooklyn Academy of Music/The Quantuck Lane Press, $95), is part of the celebration. Its photographs - some 350 of them, many in color - are gorgeous, so full of energy they can barely be confined to the page. They are wonderful for anyone to look at and think about, and for BAM habitués they provide a bumper-car ride down memory lane. But this is not the standard lavish photographic collection. With long, thoughtful essays by Phillip Lopate, John Rockwell, Jayme Koszyn and Tina Silverman, as well as brief biographies of artists who have appeared at BAM (many of them by Roger Oliver and Susan Yung) and reminiscences by, among others, Charles Mee, Meredith Monk, Peter Brook and BAM's current leaders, Joseph V. Melillo and Karen Brooks Hopkins, "BAM: The Complete Works" is bursting with information and insight. The changing demographics of Brooklyn; the history of American theater, dance and musical performance; the relationship between high and popular art; the role of the avant-garde; the way cultural institutions are built - there is enough material here to fill several books. On opening night in January 1861, Brooklyn was, after New York and Philadelphia, the third-largest city in the United States. Members of the city's WASP elite were eager, Phillip Lopate writes, to provide "a place where they and their wives could . . . see and be seen." Classical music and famous actors - including Edwin Booth, Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse - were often on the program; Henry Ward Beecher, Lucy Stone and others spoke. The academy was in part an assertion of Brooklyn's identity, but when the bridge that resulted in the loss of its independence opened in 1883, the academy joined the celebration with a reception for President Chester A. Arthur and Gov. Grover Cleveland. Almost from the start, challenges appeared that continue to be familiar. One has to do with the relationship between Brooklyn and New York and how it shapes the academy's audience. Another involves the tensions between presenting high art and the need to serve the community. Yet another is the problem of financial support; as years went by, the academy rarely broke even. To survive, it would have to find other sources of revenue. The original Gothic-Moorish building on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights burned down in 1903; the current structure, on Lafayette Avenue at the edge of Fort Greene, opened in 1908. The academy's fortunes followed Brooklyn's, and it was caught up in the borough's post-World War II decline. The predominantly Jewish audiences for classical music were increasingly reluctant to travel to increasingly black Fort Greene when they could stay on the subway all the way to Carnegie Hall. By the mid-60s, the academy was renting space to a judo school, and the end seemed to be in sight. When Lichtenstein, an arts administrator and former dancer, came to the academy in 1967, he, and members of the institution's board, had a plan. They would offer audiences - from Manhattan as well as Brooklyn - work that they could not see elsewhere in the city. Lichtenstein's strategy was to plan "a big opening and a big closing" to attract critics who were unlikely to cross the river on other occasions. The idea was to gather several avant-garde performances and present them in one season. The work was often collaborative, involving visual artists as well as music, dance and theater, and it was in addition frequently international. And controversial. Lichtenstein was not afraid to take risks and to support his artists. "Harvey said the fact that many people walked out and the press was bad didn't matter," Robert Wilson recalls. It was at this time, John Rockwell notes, that the BAM lobby became "a milling swarm of black-clad hipsters." The Next Wave turned BAM around, but it is far from the whole story. There is so much more - William Christie of Les Arts Florissants, who began to present French Baroque opera in 1989; the development of a spring season of theater (coming up in 2012 are, among others, Kevin Spacey in "Richard III" as part of the Bridge Project, an Anglo-American collaboration with the Old Vic and Neal Street, and the Maly Drama Theater of St. Petersburg's "Three Sisters"); the efforts by Lichtenstein's successors, Melillo and Hopkins, to expand BAM's outreach to the community and to build the institution. For more recent history, analysis and a wonderful photographic record, consult "BAM: The Complete Works." And if you can, come to Brooklyn. - ELSA DIXLER