{"id":16793,"date":"2011-06-09T14:46:07","date_gmt":"2011-06-09T18:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=16793"},"modified":"2011-06-09T15:21:03","modified_gmt":"2011-06-09T19:21:03","slug":"peter-sellars-on-the-winds-of-destiny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/06\/09\/peter-sellars-on-the-winds-of-destiny\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Sellars on ‘The Winds of Destiny’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Theater director Peter Sellars has never seen a great work of art that didn\u2019t reflect the madness of modern life. Which for years has driven critics around the bend, who have accused Sellars of dragging classic operas and plays through the mud of topical politics. This Friday at the venerable Ojai Music Festival<\/a>, Sellars will stage <\/em>The Winds of Destiny<\/a>, a recent work by renowned composer George Crumb, to evoke the U.S. war in Afghanistan. I recently caught up with Sellars in New York, and again on the phone, when he was in Brussels directing <\/em>Desdemona, a new theater work by Toni Morrison. His exuberance as a director carries over to his conversations, where his infectious high spirits never flag, even when addressing criticisms of his work.<\/em><\/p>\n

In the The Winds of Destiny<\/em>, Crumb recasts Civil War folk songs, \u201cWhen Johnny Comes Marching Home\u201d and \u201cBattle Hymn of the Republic,\u201d in a blistering setting of percussion and female voices. Why did you choose this piece for the Ojai festival?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Because the sense of being at war with one\u2019s own country, and the violence of that, is so intense, and has left such a deep scar in the life of our country, that it has not only not healed, it is being reopened in our lifetime. Certain people in America now are trying to rewrite the social contract of this country to exclude a huge segment of the population from prosperity and the pursuit of happiness. We\u2019ve returned to the same issues of the Civil War, where the future of America is about whether we\u2019re going to allow people who are not white to be treated equally. And George Crumb has set the music in a strange, haunted universe of memory, of regret, and those memories contain an enormous amount of violence. That\u2019s by definition post-traumatic stress disorder: things being replayed again and again; strange rattling and rustling and sleeplessness. This is music that really cuts deep.<\/p>\n

Your productions often charge art with politics. How do the Crumb songs achieve that?
<\/strong><\/p>\n

So much of our history is presented to us as sanitized, without emotion. For a while we were not allowed to see the coffins of returning U.S. service people. The idea that this emotion is being kept out of our lives, and we\u2019re fighting these wars with no emotional consequences, is unthinkable. All previous American wars did affect the emotional temper of the country. But the attempt right now is to neuter that. That has devastating consequences for returning soldiers, who are coming home from a war that the American public has no feeling about. There\u2019s no gratitude, there\u2019s no respect, there\u2019s no sense of the sacrifices they\u2019ve made. When they come back, they\u2019re expected to go right back to shopping. It\u2019s a very strange moment where war is pervasive and yet absolutely invisible. These songs summon ghosts that are still haunting us and will not be erased by any kind of public relations campaign.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re infamous for producing classic works in modern settings, like The Marriage of Figaro<\/em> in the Trump Tower. Is that your attempt to put a personal stamp on Mozart or Shakespeare?
<\/strong>
My approach is very personal, and I think that\u2019s the job description. That\u2019s what you\u2019re supposed to do as an artist. People are counting on someone to express themselves personally and to speak in a heartfelt way without prevarication and a lot of legal maneuvering and advertising that we have around us every day. It\u2019s not propagandistic, it\u2019s not to influence anybody, it\u2019s just to try and speak as honestly as possible with as much attention as possible to your own biases. It\u2019s about trying to find a moment of truth, the single most valuable thing you can offer anybody. That moment stays with you your whole life. You base your decisions on it. The easiest things in your life come from that moment of truth.<\/p>\n

Yet audiences sometimes complain your work is propagandistic, that you\u2019re trying to send them a political message.
<\/strong>
Those people clearly don\u2019t have much background in the history of art. Theater started with Greek tragedy, which is all about political messages. But not messages that come from the political world of elections and voting. Greek tragedy asks you to recognize the deep dimensions of issues and respond not just politically but humanly. It\u2019s about humanizing your politics instead of politicizing your humanity. My shows aren\u2019t finger-pointing, they\u2019re not reducing things. They\u2019re giving the political world back its complexity. We need art to detox politics because politics now are so lethal. What Congress has done this year\u2014eliminate food for elderly people and children\u2014is a human story, it\u2019s not a political one. But the consequences of these actions are never played out in the media. It\u2019s up to artists to testify to the human dimensions of the political story and to the fallout for human beings.<\/p>\n

In 2009, you staged a modern-dress Othello<\/em> to mirror Obama under political fire. The characters at times talked on cell phones and you created a new female soldier character who was assaulted. The reviews were pretty vicious. In The New York Times<\/em>, Ben Brantley wrote that \u201cSellars has written his own play about love and war, and that Shakespeare\u2019s words mostly just get in the way.\u201d Did the review hurt?
<\/strong>
Of course it hurts. But lots of things in life hurt. You can\u2019t let that stop you. You have to do the opposite. You have to take some strength from it. You have to recognize that you\u2019ve touched a very real nerve. Forgive me for saying it, because I don\u2019t want to be melodramatic, but compared to real people, I have life easier than them. Unlike Euripides, I\u2019m not dying in exile. Unlike Socrates, I\u2019m not being asked to drink hemlock. It\u2019s just a bad review in The New York Times<\/em>. Worst things have happened to artists in human history. The real guys suffered a whole lot more than I will ever suffer. Mozart died thinking that his big operas were failures.<\/p>\n

The night I saw Othello<\/em>, a few people stormed for the exits in the middle of the second act.
<\/strong>
Right, and my attitude is you were seeing a real picture of America, a bunch of people walking out, saying, \u201cI\u2019m not going to listen to this.\u201d It\u2019s the American attitude of \u201cI didn\u2019t order this, take it back to the kitchen.\u201d The idea that the whole world is their personal restaurant where everything has to be cooked for them. You just want to say, \u201cGrow up.\u201d God did not create the world based on what you like and don\u2019t like. Get over it. If your filter on life is what you like and don\u2019t like, you\u2019re going to miss most of the world. I get you don\u2019t like it. But deal with it. Engage with it. It\u2019s not just, \u201cOh, those are Muslims, I don\u2019t like them, I\u2019m leaving.\u201d Excuse me, get past your own limitation and try and reach into another place and see what people are doing and why they are doing it.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve been seen as bringing \u201cEurotrash\u201d to our shores. And even called un-American.
<\/strong>
Which again is way off the mark. I\u2019m obsessed with the enlightenment idea of this country and by the people who founded those enlightenment principles. It\u2019s why I was obsessed with Mozart and Handel. Handel was writing in the English oratorio tradition. That was a conscious attempt of very educated people, in the generation preceding Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, to say if there\u2019s going to be democracy, and people just say anything on their mind, the level of dialogue will descend rapidly. So if there\u2019s going to be public dialogue, we need to elevate it. We have to learn to speak our hearts and minds with eloquence so we can convince our fellow citizens of what would be just. Here\u2019s how I think of it now. When you\u2019re at a dinner party and you\u2019re about to say something really stupid, and the person across from you says something astounding and really brilliant, and you suddenly decide to shut up for a moment and listen. About ten minutes later, you come back with something that you would never have said originally. You have been brought to a better place.<\/p>\n

When students ask you what art is, what do you say?
<\/strong>
Art is about giving you the context where you begin to understand right and wrong more deeply. Those are the most important things in living: right choices and wrong choices. How do you understand them? What insights do you gain when you stop judging things according to the surface, and you start looking more deeply?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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