Just minutes into Karol Armitage’s The Predators’ Ball: Hucksters of the Soul—her new multi-media theater piece presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October—I couldn’t stop thinking of that strange, hothouse creature of the 1940s and 1950s, the dream ballet. These twenty-minute “ballets,” the expression of a character’s dream or fantasy, pinpointed the show’s inner conflict, poeticized it. They worked within the Broadway musical as the show’s high-art cadenza, a wordless tour de force. And they reflected the Freudian analysis that was de rigueur with the literary set, not to mention neurotic Broadway types, in mid-twentieth-century America. Couched late in the show, surrealistically staged and often sophomorically symbolic, dream ballets were little landscapes of the subconscious: an epiphany inside a pirouette. Recreated in the movie versions of Broadway shows, the ballets were opened up, filmed on vast sound stages—ninety parts sky to ten parts people—as if to stress the unrealness of the dream, its atmosphere of gravity without weight. It is on film, in fact, in movies like Oklahoma!, Carousel, An American in Paris, and Singin’ in the Rain, that most of us saw our first dream ballet. It had become a deep pocket in a celluloid strip.

I was thinking of the dream ballet because so much of what now passes for storytelling on the stage is not actual narrative but the twenty-minute dream ballet expanded to fill a two- to three-hour time slot. BAM’s Next Wave Festival specializes in