Graphic by Megan Eloise/The Gazelle

The NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center has seen a phenomenal start to its new season, with nearly every show sold out so far. For Executive Director Bill Bragin, the Center’s ongoing programming has been “a whole lot of firsts,” as he and his team co-ordinate among both local and international acts from the region. This week, Bragin sat down with The Gazelle to give his thoughts on the season and his role here at NYUAD.

Setting up the brand new Arts Center was a challenge for Bragin, who had to begin working in a new environment 7000 miles away from his previous home in New York. That said, Bragin was able to draw on his experience running the concert series at Haverford college, directing the cabaret at The Public Theater and working as Director of Public Programming at the Lincoln Center in New York.

For Bragin, this season at the Arts Center will be about testing different options and measuring the responses and reactions of the local community.

“Abu Dhabi has been a time of piloting and experimentation and possible failures ... and to me that’s all okay,” said Bragin. “What I’m doing first and foremost right now is getting a sense of who our audiences are, who our audiences could be, what they respond to and what are the different modes in which we could operate.”

Part of that has meant tracking audience member demographics, albeit not completely reliably, through a process that identifies numbers of faculty, students or general public members who purchase tickets.

“One of the things that I’m finding is that the faculty and staff especially are super hungry for this stuff,” said Bragin. “So then I’m thinking alright, how do I make sure the students have access to the tickets because your lives are more fluid and people aren’t checking their email all the time.”

Sold-out shows have become a common feature for the Arts Center, with many acts adding extra performances to keep up with demand.

“The speed in which things have been sold out has been surprising and really gratifying because it means that we’re striking a nerve,” he said.

But Bragin also worries about the Arts Center being labeled as “the place you cannot get tickets to,” especially as he strives to include the wider community outside of campus.

“The Red Theatre – inshallah – will be ready next semester, so that’s a much bigger space. There’ll also be outdoor concerts now that the weather’s getting better, so the capacity for the Nile Project and everything that’s outdoors is much, much higher than the Black Box, and it’s also a little bit more fluid,” Bragin said.

This fluidity, which refers to the fact that outdoor shows demand only an informal, sporadic degree of audience participation, should be especially encouraging for students who are curious about performances but cannot get themselves out of the library for too long.

As students have seen from the season so far, there has been a lot of interaction between the NYUAD community and visiting artists on campus. A majority of them have visited classrooms, Student Interest Groups or hosted workshops. Toshi Reagon, who gave a musical performance of the novel Parable of the Sower, spoke with The Anchorage Society and visited classes to meet students and receive feedback.

“I think it was really important for Toshi and some of the other members of the company to actually understand what’s going on on campus,” he explained. “The whole idea of the global network university and a truly cosmopolitan community really comes to life when you’re meeting people in a group of fifteen students and they’re from twenty different places, as opposed to when you’re performing on stage and you see a lot of different faces in the crowd but they’re still an audience.”

These interactions are very much part of Bragin’s vision, and something students can expect to see throughout this season.

“Most people in the world see finished performances. You go to a film when it’s done, you go to a play when it’s done. It’s gone through the whole preview cycle and you see finished work,” he added. “The people who come here are at the top of their field, so you don’t see process.”

He emphasized the importance of seeing the artists as human beings and appreciating the work that goes into the artistic process.

“The way they developed as artists is that people taught them, and I think that art is one of those fields where the master-apprentice relationship is really essential,” Bragin said.

It’s essentially a two-way street – students get the opportunity to work with and learn from highly accomplished artists, and artists are able to receive feedback and learn from their teaching.

Bragin’s work in his field started in college, where he majored in sociology while running the concert series.

“I think about my work in the context of community-building,” he said. “An Arts Center can be anything, so it’s about: What art? For whom? Which communities that you’re reaching? Which communities are being represented on stage?”

Leaving New York, where the music scene is quite literally everywhere from concert halls to metro stations, doesn’t come without challenges.

“I lived in Brooklyn and I used New York really aggressively. And so the question of moving to a place that isn’t activated in the same way is something that’s really tangible to me,” Bragin said.

At the same time, Bragin has found that many of the things that worked for him in New York have worked here, and is looking into building partnerships with people and organizations as the Arts Center starts to craft its profile and a general awareness within the community.

“That’s something that I need to build more — relationships with those people who are opinion leaders and thought leaders and network hubs,” he said.

Although Bragin moved here to Abu Dhabi from the Lincoln Center, his background from his college days has translated into an ability to look at students’ needs and understand what artistically and educationally benefits a university community.

“When I curated this series, I also really wanted to look at projects that would resonate for people who don’t know anything about art and don’t think that they care about things like modern dance,” he said.

The next show coming up, The Nile Project, will be the first of the outdoor concert series, featuring musicians from a host of countries such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda.

“Their whole premise is that they’re bringing together artists from different countries along the Nile basin – countries that are unified by geography but also divided by geography and often are in political conflict because of competition over the water resource,” Bragin explained.

“Embedded in this group are cultural traditions that really relate to so many different people and different parts of the social structure here...All of those connections is what makes this really rich," he added.

While the show is sold out, walk-in tickets will be available, and Bragin encourages students to take advantage of that.

“There’s no theme this season, there’s no through-line — it is very diverse in terms of artists and form and where people are from, and the idea is that I want to see how things land,” said Bragin.

“It’s important to me that we’re not a faceless institution. It’s not just the Arts Center at NYU, but others understand that — like with the artists — there are people behind it,” he concluded.