Norwegian art collective Verdensteatret manipulates a micro-landscape of railcars and other kinetic objects along 195 feet of train track to transform the Fishman Space into a dreamlike environment.

A downcast piano student (baritone Rod Gilfrey) recounts a life lived in the shadows of his famous friend Glenn Gould in David Lang’s dramatically staged chamber opera, featuring mezzanine-only seating. 

Isabelle Huppert is the incestuous queen Phaedra in this carnal triptych combining multiple versions of the salacious Greek legend, based on texts by Sarah Kane, J.M. Coetzee, and Wajdi Mouawad.

Zimbabwean choreographer Nora Chipaumire trades jabs with the specters of her estranged father in a makeshift boxing ring in this visceral exploration of African masculinity.

Canadian dance troupe the Holy Body Tattoo offers a searing indictment of the daily grind, featuring live accompaniment by Montreal-based post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor. 

Theater company The Civilians offer a playful and profound 21st-century take on the journey to the underworld, using a script based on conversations with shamen, morticians, philosophers, and mystics.

Choreographer John Jasperse mines his own 30-plus-year legacy and lineage for this dance rumination on our existence in time, featuring a score by composer John King. 

Polish troupe Song of the Goat Theatre distills Shakespeare’s King Lear into a frenzied tapestry of polyphonic sound, lending vibratory intensity to the Bard’s great tragedy with mere body and voice.

Composer Donnacha Dennehy’s opera about the Great Famine of 1845-52 brings together new music and old Irish songs, featuring Alarm Will Sound, folk singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, and soprano Katherine Manley. 

Director Peter Brook returns with this tale of reconciliation in the wake of war, a breathtaking distillation of the central story of The Mahabharata, the ancient Sanskrit poem Brook first staged at the BAM Harvey Theater in 1987. 

Celebrated choreographer and painter Shen Wei presents a danced realization of Morton Feldman’s 1977 anti-opera for orchestra and soprano, featuring a 16-line libretto by Samuel Beckett.

Acrobat Yoann Bourgeois and his dazzling collaborators capture the body’s ineffable moment of weightlessness while in motion in this series of vaudevillian vignettes.

Polyglot performance duo Wang Ramirez employ their signature dance-theater aesthetic—incorporating ballet, b-boying, and martial arts—to perform a choreography of near-missed connection. 

Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker returns with a dance meditation on late French composer Gérard Grisey’s spectral 1996 masterpiece. 

Mikhail Baryshnikov steps inside the psyche of Vaslav Nijinsky in director Robert Wilson’s staging of the iconic Russian dancer’s onset of schizophrenia in 1919. 

Architecture doubles as instrument in this compelling collage of offbeat pop songs and live construction from the band Open House, led and directed by Steven Reker.

A middle-aged, middle-class woman (Polish actress Danuta Stenka) goes about her well-worn evening ritual in Franz Xaver Kroetz’s devastating, wordless 1971 experiment in hyper-realism. 

Three Bardian power players enter the fluorescent-lit corridors of the present in Ivo van Hove’s clever merging of the plays Henry V, Henry VI Parts I, II & III, and Richard III. 

Dancer-choreographer Kyle Abraham makes his BAM debut with this work inspired by the 1991 hip-hop drama Boyz n the Hood and his upbringing in the Hill District of Pittsburgh.

Howard Fishman’s new play about polymathic songwriter and outsider artist Connie Converse, who vanished without an audience or album to her name but left behind treasure trove of home recordings.

French physical theater maverick Aurélien Bory takes Japanese dancer Kaori Ito, entangled in a dense field of 5,000 black nylon wires, as both muse and instrument. 

Choreographer Jonah Bokaer and artist Daniel Arsham celebrate a decade of collaboration in this evening of three works featuring an original score by Pharrell Williams.

Phantom Limb Company chronicles 5,000 years of environmental change in this series of surreal wordless vignettes, a phantasmagoric mix of puppetry, music, and macabre fairy tales.

Brooklyn-based choreographer Faye Driscoll makes her BAM debut with the second work in her Thank You For Coming trilogy, exploring the fractured nature of language.

More than 100 musicians and singers from the Wordless Music Orchestra perform live accompaniment to a special screening of Terrence Malick’s 2011 masterpiece starring Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain.

Sō Percussion’s gives the Second Amendment a soundtrack in this affecting foray into America’s fraught relationship with guns, directed by Obie-winning director Ain Gordon.

Choreographer Zvi Gotheiner and his company retrace Jack Kerouac’s most infamous route in this evening-length work, a synthesis of sensuous movement, original music, and kaleidoscopic video footage.

(Program A) Stephin Merritt and his seven-member band celebrate his 50th birthday with two distinct programs of new songs, one for every year of his melodious existence. 

(Program B) Stephin Merritt and his seven-member band celebrate his 50th birthday with two distinct programs of new songs, one for every year of his melodious existence. 

Director Declan Donnellan and Cheek by Jowl take up Shakespeare’s most fundamental questions in this fiercely contemporary staging of the Bard’s late masterpiece of wit and wisdom.

A showcase of work by animator Brent Green and documentarian Sam Green, set to live music by Brendan Canty (Fugazi), James Canty (Nation of Ulysses), and others. 

Choreographer Reggie Wilson returns to BAM with a brand new work inspired by African-American figures throughout history who chose not to leave their home country in spite of pervasive racism.

The Dublin Guitar Quartet and composer Michael Gordon redefine what the guitar as an ensemble instrument can be.

Mark Morris Dance Group’s beloved reimagining of The Nutcracker—a lavish, gender-bent love letter that playfully preserves the warm spirit of an essential holiday tradition—returns to BAM for the holidays.