AVANT-GARDE IMPRESARIO HARVEY LICHTENSTEIN STEPS DOWN.

NEW YORK CITY--"As much as I love all the different things I've ever done, in theater, music, and opera, dance remains my first love," said Harvey Lichtenstein, in an interview before his June retirement, at age 70, from his position as president and executive producer at Brooklyn Academy of Music. The acclaimed impresario is being celebrated June 3 with "The Harvey Gala," with performances by Paul Simon, Trisha Brown, Chuck Davis, Veronique Gens, Philip Glass, Erland Josephson, Mark Morris, Lou Reed, and Peter Stomare.

Lichtenstein was first a dancer, performing for five years in the companies of Sophie Maslow, Pearl Lang, and Mark Ryder-Emily Frankel. After three years working in arts management, he became executive director of BAM in 1967. "I think we've probably done more dance than anything else during the time I've been here," he says. "I don't think that reflects only my interest in dance. The dance field has been so energetic and creative over the past several decades."

During his thirty-two year tenure, Lichtenstein has made the initials "BAM" synonymous with adventurous programming and Brooklyn a destination for culture-seeking New Yorkers. He turned to the avant-garde immediately after he arrived at the Brooklyn Academy. "It was clear to me BAM was going to build its reputation doing things that weren't being done in Manhattan," he says. "Things that were of important quality and not conventional. Modern dance became a big part of that. It was a combination of my interest in an area coinciding with what made sense to do here." In 1983, he started the Next Wave Festival, now one of the most influential contemporary performing arts festivals in the United States.

In developing avant-garde programming, Lichtenstein helped a number of choreographers to be seen and recognized early in their careers. "We got involved with Merce Cunningham right away," he says. "I think we gave him his first major season in 1968, a year after I got here. We produced Eliot Feld's first company. We had Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater as a resident company a few years in the 1970s." Other young companies he has presented include those of Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris, Bill T. Jones, and Laura Dean.

Lichtenstein's reach has extended around the globe. "In the early 1970s we had an Afro-Asian festival," he continues. "We introduced Maurice Bejart's company to New York in 1971, presented Billy Forsythe and the Frankfurt Ballet, Jiri Kylian and the Netherlands Dance Theater, John Neumeier and the Hamburg Ballet. Pina Bausch has been a regular visitor here since 1984. She's coming back again this fall.

"It goes up until the present time. We have had a relationship with Mark Morris for quite a few years now. He's going to open his headquarters building almost across the street. We have a continuing relationship with Bill T. Jones."

For Lichtenstein, the most memorable dance moments at BAM include Carla Fracci and Erik Bruhn in Giselle and Coppelia with American Ballet Theatre; the choreography Lucinda Childs created for Glass's Einstein on the Beach; and Bausch's performances during the 1980 season. "She exploded on the New York scene," says Lichtenstein. "It was astonishing, totally different from any dance seen in New York. [Dance critic] Arlene Croce called it `Eurotrash.' It was a dance-theater concept, with talking. Her basis is dance. It all came together but wasn't a traditional narrative in any sense. I thought it was a revelation, a new kind of dance theater for New York to see."

Another controversial BAM presentation was the New York premiere of Jones's Still/Here, dismissed by Croce as being "victim art." Lichtenstein disagrees. "I thought it was a brilliant work of art," he says. "It dealt with its subject, AIDS, in dance terms and aesthetically within the parameters of the art form."

Lichtenstein, who sees almost all of the companies before they are engaged by BAM, has also said no to works he likes. "The nature of this job is not only to find interesting stuff," he says. "This is also a business. There have been occasions when I've said, `It's too expensive' or `I don't have an audience for it.' We have to do a juggling act between putting things onstage which we think are important and worthwhile and keeping to our budget and not going down the drain. I like that, though. If things were always easy--`It's great; we'll put it on'--it would take away part of the puzzle of figuring out how to make this theater work. There are times when I say, `We can't do it.'"

As for the future of dance, Lichtenstein says, "We've lost some great people. I hope and think there's a vitality that will sustain itself in dance. Ballet has a tougher time than modern dance in the creative arena. Forsythe is the next stop past Balanchine. Maybe he will lead ballet in fertile directions. There need to be breakthroughs. I don't see any spectacular breakthroughs with the younger set. But I really still have faith in what can happen in dance."

Audiences are not so jaded that they think they're going to have seen everything, Lichtenstein believes. "There are always going to be things that are going to surprise us. The nature of the art is the fact that they keep pushing forward in ways that are unexpected. The full-length piece in three parts that we did last December by Forsythe, Eidos:Telos, was surprising and startling to most people, in the kind of movement, the way he put it together, the way it related to space and music and sounds. It was pretty far-out."

Musing that one generation's avant-garde often becomes the next generation's mainstream, Lichtenstein says, "If I've contributed to that, that's great."