Byrne: I don’t know. The audience was sometimes really small, so maybe the risk wasn’t so high. And the cost of living was cheaper. I remember the early CBGB days when suddenly all these fine artists decided they were going to be in bands, which brought a different aesthetic to music-making. And then not too many years later, it went totally the other way. Everybody who could was suddenly painting.

Binder: It’s interesting also that now [in New York], you have [multipurpose performance venues like] the Park Avenue Armory and the Shed, but back then, BAM was the only place where large-scale work by that whole community of artists could be presented.

T: But that was a relatively small community of young artists. How do you nurture that now that BAM is a juggernaut?

Binder: I always want the work to have the widest possible audience. Doing something like “Hedwig” on Broadway, the only thing commercial about it was that it succeeded. I feel like those kinds of boundaries and categories are all falling down, and things that are at the intersection of multiple genres are, of course, BAM’s bread and butter. But the idea of the Next Wave Festival this season is to go back to [the longtime BAM president] Harvey Lichtenstein and Joe Melillo’s original intention. So every single artist in the Next Wave Festival is brand-new to BAM.

Byrne: It’s about time. It’s exciting. There’s a good chance everything won’t be for everyone. But there are places that have cultivated an audience who will go to see something they’ve never heard of. And that can take a little while, but then once you build up that trust, they’ll see almost whatever you put on.

Binder: We will eventually reintroduce some of the more legacy BAM artists into Next Wave, but we’re going to try new folks for a couple of years. The things we’re looking for could probably not be done anywhere else in the city. Like this show, “What if They Went to Moscow?” by Christiane Jatahy. Half the audience goes into BAM Rose Cinemas and half goes into the Fisher theater, and in the Fisher, they see a play inspired by Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” which is filmed with multiple cameras and screened live in the cinema. And then the audiences switch places. I’m also interested in site-specific work. New York organizations tend not to want to get out of the buildings. So we’re going to try that this fall, too.