Peter Sellars
Peter Sellars (born September 27, 1957) is an American theatre director, renowned for his contemporary stagings of classical operas and plays. Sellars is professor of World Arts and Cultures at U.C.L.A. where he teaches Art as Social Action and Art as Moral Action.
Biography
Early and middle career
Sellars was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and attended Phillips Academy and, subsequently, Harvard University, graduating in 1981. As an undergraduate, he performed a puppet version of Wagner's Ring cycle, and directed a minimalist production of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, with mature birch trees on the stage apron at Loeb Drama Center and Chopin Nocturnes played on a concert grand piano seen through a suspended gauze box set. Sellars' production of Antony and Cleopatra in the swimming pool of Harvard's Adams House brought press attention well beyond campus, as did the subsequent techno-industrial production of King Lear which included a Lincoln Continental on-stage and ambient musical moods by the Steel Cello Ensemble. In his senior year, he staged a production of Gogol's The Inspector-General at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA.
This was followed during the summer of 1980 by staging of Don Giovanni performed under the aegis of the Monadnock Music Festival in Manchester, NH, which Opera News hailed as "an act of artistic vandalism". In the winter of 1980, a production of Handel's Orlando, again at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, brought him to national attention -- perhaps because of the novel conceit of setting it in outer space. Later, Sellars studied in Japan, China, and India.
Sellars served as director of the Boston Shakespeare Company for the 1983-1984 season. Among his productions were an influential Pericles, Prince of Tyre and a shattering staging of The Lighthouse by British composer Peter Maxwell Davies. In 1983 he received a MacArthur Foundation award.
In 1984, he was named director and manager of the American National Theater in Washington, D.C. at the age of 26, a post he held until 1986. During his years in Washington, Sellars staged a production of the Count of Monte Cristo, in a version by James O'Neill, featuring Richard Thomas, Patti Lupone, David Warrilow, Zakes Mokae, and many other outstanding performers. The production had a set design by George Tsypin, with costumes by Dunya Ramicova, and lighting by James F. Ingalls. He also directed productions of Idiot's Delight by Robert Sherwood and Sophocles's Ajax, as adapted by Robert Auletta.
He was Artistic Director of the 1990 and 1993 Los Angeles Festivals, presenting works of talented artists like the late Iranian director Reza Abdoh, and playwright Frank Ambriz.
Sellars subsequently staged a series of Mozart's operas, Cosi Fan Tutte (set in a diner on Cape Cod), The Marriage of Figaro (set in a luxury apartment in New York City's Trump Tower), and Don Giovanni (set in New York City's Spanish Harlem), in collaboration with Emmanuel Music and its Artistic Director, Craig Smith. The productions were met with great critical acclaim, recorded in Austria by ORF in 1989, subsequently televised by PBS, and later revived at MC93 Bobigny Paris and the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona .
Sellars's directed his first, and only, feature film, The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez, a silent color film starring Joan Cusack, Peter Gallagher, Ron Vawter, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. He was featured in Jean-Luc Godard's film of King Lear, which he co-scripted.
Sellars was invited to the Salzburg and Glyndebourne Festivals, where he mounted productions of various 20th century operas, notably Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise, Paul Hindemith's Mathis der Maler, György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, and, with choreographer Mark Morris, the premiere of John Adams' and Alice Goodman's Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, and the premiere of Kaija Saariaho's first opera L'amour de loin.
Other projects in which he has been involved include stagings of Handel's opera Giulio Cesare and oratorio Theodora, Stravinsky's The Story of a Soldier with the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky and Peony Pavilion.
He directed an important production of The Persians at the Edinburgh Festival in 1993, which articulated the play as a response to the Gulf War of 1990-1991.[1]
In 1998, Sellars was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his work combining European and American cultural traditions in opera and theatre.
One of Sellars' closest musical associates is the composer John Adams. Sellars directed (and wrote the libretto for) Adams' Dr. Atomic, about Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb, for the San Francisco Opera (2005), De Nederlandse Opera, and the Chicago Lyric Opera (2008). This opera received mixed reviews.
Recent years
In August, 2006, he directed a staged performance of Mozart's unfinished opera Zaide as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center in New York; the pre-concert discussions were about contemporary slavery and the prospect of abolishing it, as well as Mozart's egalitarianism and opposition to slavery. In late 2006, Sellars organized the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna, Austria as Artistic Director (the festival was part of Vienna Mozart Year 2006), and directed there the premieres of Kaija Saariaho's oratorio La Passion de Simone and John Adams' most recent opera, A Flowering Tree, also in Vienna.
In 2007, Sellars delivered the "State of Cinema" address at the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival on April 29. He introduced the screenings of Mahamat Saleh Haroun's Daratt and Garin Nugroho's Opera Jawa, two of the New Crowned Hope films and it also screened Jon Else's documentary, Wonders Are Many, which features an account of Adams and Sellars creation of the first San Francisco production of Doctor Atomic. An extensive commentary by Sellars is included in the 2007 DVD of Grigori Kozintsev's King Lear by Facets Video.
In early 2009, Sellars co-curated a contemporary art exhibition of work by Ethiopian artist Elias Simé at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, a kunsthalle in Santa Monica, California.
Controversy
Sellars has been no stranger to controversy, often criticized for straying too far from the composer's intention. György Ligeti was deeply upset at Sellars's 1997 production of his Le Grand Macabre at the Salzburg Festival.[citation needed] On the other hand, Kaija Saariaho has stated [citation needed] that Sellars's design for the Salzburg and Santa Fe Opera productions of her 2000 opera L'amour de loin was in harmony with her imagination of the set. Sellars again worked with Saariaho in directing the 2006 Paris, and 2008 Helsinki and Santa Fe presentations of her second opera, Adriana Mater. And as a review puts it, "In the TV interview Saariaho named director Sellars as the hero of the performance. Aside from the bitter and violent war events, Sellars has added to the opera a dimension of hope that the conductor herself had not envisaged in the first place." [2]
In 2001, Peter Sellars briefly directed South Australia's Adelaide Festival of Arts before being replaced by Sue Nattrass. Sellars' brief directorship remains the most controversial in the Festival's history. Sellars claimed the reason behind his shock departure was that he was 'impeding the forward progress of the Festival' [3] The Opposition Arts Spokesperson for South Australia, the Hon. Carolyn Pickles, said of the situation at the time: "Peter Sellars asked the community to take a leap of faith for his particular Festival which was based around themes. He also rejected what he termed 'the shopping trolley'[4] approach to Festivals. We took him on faith and embraced his dream, but soon it became apparent... that the emperor had no clothes. Critics gave the programme the thumbs down, which finally precipitated action on the part of the Festival Board." [5]
Notes
- ^ See Favorini (2003).
- ^ "Adriana Mater opera's world première is big success in Paris", Helsingen Sanomat (Finland) from www.hs.fi, 4 April 2006
- ^ "Peter Sellars resigns from Adelaide Festival" Gramophone.co.uk, 13 November 2001
- ^ The "shopping trolley" approach to festivals involves choosing existing works that have been presented elsewhere in the world to critical acclaim.
- ^ The Hon. Carolyn Pickles - Opposition Arts Spokesperson for South Australia speaks on ABC's Radio National program Perspective (transcript)
References
- Favorini, Attilio. 2003. "History, Collective Memory, and Aeschylus' Persians." Theatre Journal 55:1 (March): 99-111.
- Meyer-Thoss, Gottfried, Extrakte. Peter Sellars - Amerikanisches Welttheater, Parthas Verlag Berlin, 2004
External links
- Video: Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn at LIVE from the New York Public Library, March 7, 2008
- Jobson, Kristi L., "From Hilles Elevator to the ART", The Harvard Crimson, January 10, 2003. [1]
- Peter Sellars at IMDb
- Transcript of ABC Speech Cultural Activism in the New Century, August 19, 1999
- Interview with Peter Sellars at PBS
- Guardian interview with Peter Sellars
- UCLA Today article on Art Activism
- PBS Interview with Peter Sellars