'Disruptive and influential' director Peter Sellars on his New Zealand performances

February 28, 2020

MacArthur Fellow Peter Sellars is a distinguished professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, where he has taught since 1988. Known for exploring challenging moral issues such as race, war, poverty, and the international refugee crisis through his work, his most notable courses include Art as Moral Action and Art as Social Action. Sellars has gained international renown for his groundbreaking and transformative interpretations of artistic masterpieces and for collaborative projects with an extraordinary range of creative artists across three decades. Sellars is the founding director of the Boethius Institute at UCLA, which invites scholars, activists, and artists to work together on projects of public significance, exploring radical ways to rethink relationships of communities and complex issues, using the arts as the point of entry and the point of transformation.

Peter Sellars. Photo/Getty Images

"After shaking up the US theatre world for 40-plus years, Peter Sellars is staging two “mind-blowing” and “beautiful” musical productions for audiences in Auckland and Wellington.

Director Peter Sellars always has vertical hair and a friendly smile. The iconoclastic artist has also raised the hair and the ire of conservative elements of the classical music establishment since his arrival as enfant terrible on the US operatic scene. “Artistic vandalism” thundered Opera News after his radical staging of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Monadnock Music Festival in 1980. In Sellars’ production, set in an urban ghetto in the style of “blaxploitation” cinema, the promiscuous Don partied almost naked, shooting up heroin.

Four decades later, a laughing Sellars is unrepentant. “It’s so weird,” he says, “when people want to own something. For me, it’s all about what people are doing right now. These composers are writing for the ages. Mozart hated the 18th century and to force him back there now he’s finally escaped is just cruel.”

Productions directed by Sellars will be staged in March at both the New Zealand Festival of the Arts in Wellington and the Auckland Arts Festival. Today, he is lauded as one of the most “disruptive and influential” directors on the contemporary performing-arts scene, collaborating with such conductors as Sir Simon Rattle and Esa-Pekka Salonen, composer John Adams and visual artist Sir Anish Kapoor.

It seemed inevitable that Sellars would work in theatre. As a precocious 10-year-old, he was apprenticed to a marionette theatre producing fairy tales in exotic settings. High school took Sellars to the legendary Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts where the teenager discovered the operas of innovative director Sarah Caldwell, founder of the Boston Opera Group."— Elizabeth Kerr, Feb. 28, 2020

This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Noted website.
Read more about Peter Sellars.

Stay engaged. Use #UCLAarts to stay connected.