Broke was inspired by paramedic/poet Maggie Dubris’s book, BrokeDown Palace. Film-maker Antonino D’Ambrosio, in his afterward to the Subpress edition, writes that the book captures , “the searing years of joy mixed with pain, chaos with freedom . . . a time defined by a city sick, broken, on its knees but still flailing at the ropes, desperate to stand before being counted out.”
Andy Teirstein and Maggie Dubris talk about the genesis of Broke.
The creators of Broke, Maggie Dubris, Donald Byrd, and Andy Teirstein, are of the generation that lived and worked through the turmoil of the 1980s and 90s in New York City; a city that has now largely vanished. Broke is not only a roller-coaster ride through that era, but also a meditation on the echoes of memory. How do actions lost to the past impact the present, and what happens to those times that once seemed so bright?
Librettist Maggie Dubris draws on her years of experience driving an ambulance in midtown Manhattan to paint this intimate portrait of the city, seen through the eyes of a New York City paramedic. With input from the project’s beginning from eminent choreographer Donald Byrd, the piece creates a language of dance, music and words to convey layers of witnessed experience. The audience is pulled into into a New York that is now all but lost. The sound world of Broke incorporates the city’s vast reservoir of musical traditions. Teirstein studied with Leonard Bernstein, Tania León, and David del Tredici, and has performed with Paul Simon and Pete Seeger. The music will bring the energy of the driving fiddle tunes Teirstein learned in the pubs of Ireland, drum patterns he studied ion his trips to Ghana and Cuba, and a rambunctious asymmetry reminiscent of Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin.