Innovators: Beryl Korot's videos have been set to the music of Steve Reich.

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This month’s 20th Next Wave Festival performances are appropriately dominated by innovative 20th-century music, often paired with video imagery.

American composer Steve Reich is no stranger to BAM - his seminal percussion piece "Drumming" was danced to by a Belgian troupe last season.

Reich and video artist Beryl Korot have teamed up this season for "Three Tales," a cautionary tale about the dangers of technology, demonstrated by the Hindenburg disaster, 1945 atomic bomb tests and cloned sheep Dolly.

"Steve’s music has many influences," says BAM executive producer Joseph V. Melillo. "It’s contemporary, it’s electronic, and [in ’Three Tales’] it’s beautifully enhanced by the marriage of musicians and singers integrated into the visual material."

While "Three Tales" weds Reich’s current music with digital video, French-Algerian choreographer Angelin Preljocaj melds his singularly modernist dance style to two difficult works from both ends of the 20th century: iconoclastic German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s bizarre "Helikopter" Quartet (from 1993) and Igor Stravinsky’s brash, brutal "The Rite of Spring" (from 1913).

"He is the most exciting choreographer working today," Melillo says of Preljocaj. "Stockhausen’s quartet is marked by a relentless pounding of string instruments - the helicopter’s propellers are heard while the quartet performs. [Preljocaj’s dance] is a marriage of video, movement and Stockhausen’s score."

And Preljocaj’s take on Stravinsky’s primal ballet? "It is, in a word, ferocious," Melillo explains. "You will feel threatened."



"Three Tales" will be performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Howard Gilman Opera House [30 Lafayette Ave.] on Oct. 16, Oct. 18 and Oct. 19 at 7:30 pm; tickets are $25 and $45. There will be a BAMDialogue with Steve Reich and Beryl Korot on Oct. 16 at 6 pm.

"Helikopter & Rite of Spring" will be performed at the BAM Harvey Theater [651 Fulton St.] on Oct. 16-19 at 7:30 pm; tickets are $20, $35 and $50. For more information go to www.bam.org or call (718) 636-4100.

©2002 Community Newspaper Group