Sufjan Stevens Takes The BQE to BAM

Last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Howard Gilman Opera House, 32-year-old singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens premiered The BQE, his mind-blowing audiovisual homage to Robert Moses's 11.7-mile concrete thoroughfare that snakes through Brooklyn and connects it to Queens. As part of the 25th anniversary of its “Next Wave Festival,” BAM aptly commissioned Stevens -- an ambitious chronicler of place through chamber-pop folk music with plans to write a record about each of the fifty states -- to compose new music about the borough he now calls home.

At first (and fourth) glance, the BQE seems like an unlikely slice of Brooklyn about which to compose a piece of orchestral music; any mention of the expressway to someone who's lived in one of the outer boroughs east of Manhattan for a few years will immediately conjure up images of ubiquitous orange cones, pot holes, traffic jams, construction signs, torn tires, chicken bones, shreds of upholstery, boarded-up warehouses, crumbling tenements, and dilapidated billboards. But this is exactly why it was chosen by Stevens, who's previously written beautiful music about other not-so-pretty, man-made structures that often interfere with Mother Nature's designs, including those in Detroit, Flint, and Romulus -- cities in Stevens' (and my) home state of Michigan on his 2003 gem of an album Greetings from Michigan. As he's done with those subjects, Stevens didn't tackle his latest head-on, but instead came at the BQE from various angles and with numerous pieces of modern machinery, including 38 musical instruments, 16-millimeter and Super 8 cameras, and five adept hula-hoopers. (Stevens played the piano during the show but didn't sing; "The BQE" is a seven-movement instrumental piece.)

The half-hour experience of witnessing The BQE felt more like riding Coney Island's Cyclone than anything I can imagine occurring on the expressway, which is prone to standstills and congestion. It was as if Stevens set out to disorientate his audience, purposely putting them off balance and pulling them along at various paces, across stretches of straightaways, and up and down steep climbs and falls.

The ride's big hill comes at about the 20-minute mark, at which point the orchestra begins a crescendo while overlapping film images of the BQE and its surrounding neighborhoods quicken in pace, and five hula-hoopers in white outfits emblazoned with slices of glow-in-the-dark neon twirl their also-glowing apparatuses faster and faster around their arms, legs and necks. Just as the music peaks in volume, the hoopers enter their hoops for the first time and, akin to whirling dervishes, vigorously rotate them about their hips, continuing to defy gravity, while the audience feels as if that force has completely taken over, plummeting them back to earth and inducing a goose-bump rush of adrenaline.

The ride lasts 10 more minutes, the moving images of bumper-to-bumper, east- and west-bound cars speeding up and slowing down and crashing into each other, headlights coming in and out focus, while the orchestra alternates between graceful and cacophonous sounds, as if invoking symphonic Sunday drives and traffic jams.

A few moments after Saturday night's performance coasted to a stop, the words “THE END” overtaking slow motion images of hula-hoopers on the side of the BQE, Stevens reemerged for a curtain call. He walked to center stage while twirling a hula hoop around his waist, not expertly, but good enough to keep it circling his hips through most of a three-minute standing ovation.

And that was just the first act of the show.

After an intermission, Stevens returned with his orchestra for the second that was billed, appropriately enough and uncharacteristically simply, as "Sufjan Plays the Hits." During this longer act, he performed 10 of his previously recorded songs plus a new track and, with the addition of plastic wings clipped to his back and his ethereal and transcendent voice, took the house even higher.

Photos by Rahav Sagev