Peter Sellars

Peter Sellars (born September 27, 1957) is an American theater director, renowned for his contemporary stagings of classical operas and plays. Sellars is professor of [http://www.wac.ucla.edu/index.php World Arts and Culture] at U.C.L.A. where he teaches "Art as Social Action" and "Art as Moral Action".

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 Scottish 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".

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. [See Favorini (2003).]

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.

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 [http://www.newcrownedhope.org New Crowned Hope Festival] in Vienna, Austria as Artistic Director (the festival was part of Vienna Mozart Year 2006), and directed the premiere 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".

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.Fact|date=July 2008 On the other hand, Kaija Saariaho has stated Fact|date=July 2008 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".

Notes

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

* [http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/pep/pepdesc.cfm?id=3996 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. [http://thecrimson.net/article.aspx?ref=256032]
*imdb name|id=0783299|name=Peter Sellars
* [http://www.abc.net.au/arts/sellars/text.htm Transcript of ABC Speech "Cultural Activism in the New Century", August 19, 1999]
* [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/voices/sellars.html Interview with Peter Sellars at PBS]