Running Sept. 17-Dec. 22, the Next Wave Festival includes opera, dance, theatre and music programming at BAM's Howard Gilman Opera House, the Harvey Theater and the Richard B. Fisher Building.

Programming highlights follow:

The Blue Dragon
Ex Machina
By Marie Michaud and Robert Lepage
Directed by Robert Lepage
Sept. 18-21
The sequel to Robert Lepage's five-and-a-half-hour spectacle The Dragons. "The Blue Dragon picks up with Lamontagne (Lepage, reprising the role) 20 years later when his life as an art dealer with a new lover (Tai Wei Foo) in Shanghai is interrupted by an old love, Claire Forêt (Michaud), who reappears for an adoption process in China. Examining the issues of aging, fertility, creativity, and the cultural divide between East and West—all framed in a love triangle— The Blue Dragon reaffirms Lepage’s groundbreaking aesthetics and thrilling theatricality."

A Rite
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company & SITI Company
Conceived, directed and choreographed by Bogart, Jones and Janet Wong
Oct. 3-5
"A true dance-theatre piece, A Rite examines the revolutionary score through the lens of our present cultural moment, incorporating the writings of physicist Brian Greene, musicologist Severine Neff, and Jonah Lehrer's bestselling book 'Proust was a Neuroscientist.' The cast of dancers and actors blend seamlessly—from a discourse on the piece and its controversial reception to large group dances that reflect Nijinsky’s famous steps—all set to a deconstruction of the score that ranges from a modern recording to an old crackling one to a section sung by the cast. A Rite utilizes the social-historical context of the score as a point of departure, reflecting on the human condition— sacrifice, creative and spiritual death, and the individual against or with the community."

Nosferatu
Inspired by Bram Stoker's "Dracula"
TR Warszawa and Teatr Narodowy
Written and directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna
Oct. 3-Nov. 2
"Nosferatu unearths themes that lay within this quintessential vampire who is trapped between life and death, and whose diabolical passions prey upon the innocent and the beautiful. Bringing to light and exploring vampiric myths—life after death, obsession with aesthetic, the regenerating power of blood, consequences of immortality, religion, and motives of the undead—Grzegorz Jarzyna shows how fears and obsessions materialize in daily social life, affected by the human need for transgression, challenging social or symbolic constraints, and a release from identity, forever in search of the new." An Enemy of the People
By Henrik Ibsen
In a version by Florian Borchmeyer
Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz
Directed by Thomas Ostermeier
Nov. 6-9
"Ostermeier electrifies Henrik Ibsen's classic and prescient tale of industrial pollution, institutional corruption, and social conformity via audience interaction, paint bombs, and rock concert style set destruction. As one man, Dr. Stockmann, works to alert his small spa town to the poison infiltrating the waters from which it makes its livelihood, he is increasingly defied and defamed by a convoluted web of vested interests."

Water
Filter Theatre & Lyric Hammersmith
Created by Filter Theatre and David Farr
Nov. 13-16
"Half-brothers in Canada clash over the legacy of their dead father. An environmental advisor attempts to push through a deal at a political summit. A young man prepares to dive the deepest freshwater cave in the world, located in Mexico. Utilizing Filter Theatre's signature theatrical style of exposing the workings of a production via on-stage creation of video and sound, among other elements, Water examines how an increasingly unstable world of climate change is affecting human life."

Bodycast: An Artist Lecture
By Suzanne Bocanegra starring Frances McDormand
Directed by Paul Lazar
Dec. 3-5
"Inspired by the two teenage years visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra spent in a body cast due to scoliosis, Bodycast is an inventive theatricalization of the ubiquitous 'artist talk.' Part performance and part essay, it is Bocanegra's exploration of how and why she became an artist... Exploring topics as disparate as Roman art, Rose queens, and Texas drill teams, Bodycast mines specific details of Bocanegra's life to create a more general meditation on art-making and shifting ideals of feminine beauty. Singer Theo Bleckmann will make a guest appearance in the work."

A Piece of Work: A machine-made Hamlet by Annie Dorsen
Dec. 18-21
"This is a Hamlet as you've never seen and heard before—and, by design, never will again. The complete text of Shakespeare's Hamlet is fed into a computer, which, based on a sophisticated algorithm, generates new lines, new scenes, even new sound and lighting cues during each performance. The new text is transmitted through earpiece to the on-stage actor (Scott Shepherd and Joan MacIntosh in alternating performances) who enact these seemingly familiar yet unscripted lines on the spot. Combining live acting with computational processes, Annie Dorsen questions the nature of theatre itself and its historical fascination with the representation of the human."

As previously reported, Olivier Award-winning actress Fiona Shaw will bring The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to BAM Dec. 10-22. The season will also include the the Mark-Anthony Turnage-Richard Thomas opera Anna Nicole Sept. 17-28.

For a complete list of Next Wave Festival programming, visit BAM.org.