American director Peter Sellars will be addressing the Asian Performing Arts Forum, in a talk titled ‘Asia on the World Stage.’ This free talk is co-sponsored with SOAS, and will take place on 10 November at 18.30 at the Khalil Lecture Theatre, School of African and Oriental Studies Thornhaugh street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG.
Renowned theater, opera, and festival director Peter Sellars is one of the most innovative and powerful forces in the performing arts in America and abroad. A visionary artist, Sellars is known for groundbreaking interpretations of classic works. Among the operas he has created are Nixon in China and A Flowering Tree (both with American composer John Adams) and The Peony Pavilion (with Tan Dun), all of which deal with Asian themes. Sellars has led several major arts festivals, including the 1990 and 1993 Los Angeles Festivals; the 2002 Adelaide Arts Festival in Australia; and the 2003 Venice Biennale International Festival of Theater in Italy. In 2006 he was Artistic Director of New Crowned Hope, a month-long festival in Vienna for which he invited international artists from diverse cultural backgrounds to create new work in the fields of music, theater, dance, film, the visual arts, and architecture for the city of Vienna’s Mozart Year celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. Sellars is a professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA and Resident Curator of the Telluride Film Festival. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Erasmus Prize, the Sundance Institute Risk-Takers Award, and the Gish Prize, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Seating is limited, so those wishing to attend will be required to reserve a place by going to the link at the APAF website, http://asianperformingartsforum.wordpress.com/upcoming-events/|
The Asian Performing Arts Forum was founded in June 2010 as a strategic partnership among the Centre for International Theatre and Performance Research at Royal Holloway, University of London, Roehampton University’s Centre for Dance Research and the East Asian Performance Research Group at the University of Reading, with the support of the Centre for Creative Collaboration. It brings together UK-based scholars, visiting academics, artists and community members to discuss current research and issues related to the performing arts of Asia as practiced and theorised internationally to generate and support new research, disseminate the work of UK and international researchers to relevant communities of interest and transfer knowledge between the arts industry and academia. For further information, please see http://asianperformingartsforum.wordpress.com