BAM and Barclays Center Strike Up Arts Partnership

Grande jetés and encores may join the jabs and jump shots at Downtown Brooklyn's Barclays Center. The developers of the 18,000-seat arena announced on Thursday that they are looking around the corner to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) for arts programming.

Bruce Ratner, CEO of the stadium's developer Forest City Ratner Companies, was BAM's chairman from 1992 until 2001, and reached out to the current president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Karen Brooks Hopkins, to see if BAM could act as an arts consultant to his project. BAM agreed, signing on to use the arena for performances that wouldn't fit on a typical stage.

"It's another palette," Hopkins said. "This is a very large scale, it's not a traditional theater, it can be set up in a variety of ways. It's just another opportunity."

Though she said it was too early to reveal specific programs that would be headed to the Barclays Center, Hopkins said that theater, dance and nouvelle cirque events were ideas for performances that could be held in the arena.

Barclays Center is scheduled to open in September of 2012.