Author: Peter Sellars
Translation: Ozana Oancea

Dear friends,

Now, as the world is caught up, hour by hour and minute by minute, in a continuous stream of news, may I invite all of us – the creators – to step into our own eyes, our own reality, and our own perspective on an epic time, an epic change, an epic consciousness, an epic vision? We are living in an epic period in human history, and the profound and massive changes we are experiencing in the relationships of human beings with themselves, with each other, and with non-human worlds tend to exceed our power to feel, articulate, and express.

We don't really live in the 24-hour news cycle; we live on the edge of time. The newspapers and the media are totally unprepared and incapable of talking about what we are experiencing.

Where is the language, what are the gestures, and what are the images that could allow us to understand the changes and collapses we are experiencing? And how could we convert the immediate content of our lives, not into press reports, but into lived experience?
Theater is the artistic form of human experience.

In a world overwhelmed by vast media campaigns, simulated experiences, and terrifying prophecies, how can we move beyond the endless repetition of numbers to feel the sacred and infinite character of a particular life, a particular ecosystem, a friendship, or the quality of light in a strange sky? Two years of COVID-19 have darkened people's senses, constricted their lives, severed connections, and pushed us to a bizarre ground zero of existence.

What seeds need to be planted and replanted in these years? What invasive and invasive species need to be completely and definitively eliminated? So many people have reached their limits. So much violence erupts suddenly, irrationally and unexpectedly. So many systems, until yesterday solid, have proven to be structures of insatiable cruelty.

Where are our commemorative ceremonies? What do we need to remember? What are the rituals that would allow us, finally, to reimagine and begin to travel paths we have never yet explored?

The theater of epic vision, of intention, of repair, of healing needs new rituals. We don't need to be entertained. We need to come together. We need to share the same space – and we need to cultivate the shared space. We need protected spaces where we can be equal and where we can listen to each other.

Theater represents a space, created on earth, of equality between human beings, gods, plants, animals, raindrops, tears, a space of regeneration. The space of equality and profound mutual listening is illuminated by a hidden beauty and kept alive by a deep interaction between danger, equanimity, wisdom, action and patience.

In the Flowering Ornament Sutra, the Buddha lists ten kinds of supreme patience in human life. One of the most powerful is called the Patience of Perceiving Everything as a Mirage. Theater has always presented the life of this world as a mirage, making us see with clarity and liberating force through human illusion, disillusionment, blindness, and denial.

We are so certain of what we look at and how we look at everything that we are unable to see and feel alternative realities, new possibilities, different approaches, invisible relationships and connections beyond time.

This is the moment when we must deeply refresh our minds, our senses, our histories, and our futures. And this work cannot be done by isolated people, working alone. It is a work that we must do together. Theatre is the invitation to do this work together.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your work.

Peter Sellars
Theater and opera director, festival director

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Peter Sellars, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA) is an opera director and festival director. He has gained international recognition for his revolutionary, transformative interpretations of the classics, for his commitment to contemporary 20th-century music, and for his collaborations with an extraordinary diversity of creative artists. His entire oeuvre highlights the power of art as a means of moral expression and social action.
Sellars collaborated on several works by composer John Adams, including Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, El Niño, Doctor Atomic, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, and The Girls of the Golden West. Inspired by the compositions of Kaije Saariaho, he produced productions of her works (L'Amour de loin, Adriana Mater, Only the Sound Remains), which have enriched the repertoire of modern opera.

Recent (pre-pandemic) performances include the new staging of Doctor Atomic at Santa Fe Opera, Kopernikus, by Claude Vivier, created for the Festival D'Automne (Paris), and the performance after Idomeneo, by Mozart, for the Salzburg Festival.
In late 2020, he conceived and directed “This body is so impermanent …” a film created in response to the global pandemic, inspired by texts from the Vimalakirti Sutra. Among the projects in progress are the adaptation of Roman du Fauvel, in collaboration with Benjamin Bagby, musicologist and founder of the Sequentia ensemble; the reprise of his famous production of Tristan and Isolde, a story whose videography created by artist Bill Viola gives a special light and depth; and Perle Noire, meditations for Josephine, with music by Tyshawn Sorey, composer and multi-instrumentalist, performed by the stunning vocalist Julia Bullock.

Sellars has been the director of several major festivals, including the Los Angeles Festivals in 1990 and 1993 and the Adelaide Arts Festival in 2002. In 2006 he was artistic director of the New Crowned Hope festival in Vienna, where he invited both very young and established artists from diverse cultural backgrounds to create new works in music, theatre, dance, film, visual arts and architecture in celebration of the 250th anniversary of Mozart. He was also the musical director of the 2016 Ojai Music Festival.
Sellars is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Arts and World Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the founding director of the Boethius Institute at UCLA, the resident curator of the Telluride Film Festival, and a mentor for the Rolex Arts Initiative. He is a MacArthur Fellow, the recipient of the Erasmus Prize for Contributions to European Culture, the Gish Prize, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been awarded the prestigious Polar Music Award and was named Artist of the Year by Musical America.