Peters Paper Company Warehouse

Transcription

[pause] Richard Ouzounian: Hi, good evening, everybody. I should not be saying this with an executive of the Toronto Star so close, but on nights like tonight I feel I am probably one of the luckiest people in the world. In fact, I'm feeling that a lot around this week. About a year and a half ago due to personnel changes and things at the paper, I was also given the Opera Reviewing portfolio which was a joy 'cause I was already going to all the operas and loving them, but now I got a chance to talk about them. And when they announced the season we're in now about a year ago, and I saw that Tristan was there and Mr. Heppner was gonna be singing and Peter was gonna be directing it, I kind of felt I had died and gone to heaven. That was what I wanted to see all this year and it's coming tomorrow night. And I'm like a kid the night before Christmas. But then of course, the gifts keep on coming because I asked if I could interview Peter and they said yes. We had never met. I had seen dozens of his stage works and operas over the years. He's gonna hoot when I say this but I will never forget your production of The Count of Monte Cristo in Washington, DC. [laughter] RO: He does so many different things, you never can keep up with it. And we sat down and met to do the interview that was in the paper a couple of weeks ago, we became instant friends. And I'm delighted to be here again tonight. You know who he is, that's why you're here. He is... The word 'genius' gets flung around a lot but it's a unique word and Peter is unique. He makes magic. Whatever art form he's in, he will not settle for the ordinary. He doesn't want to dirty his hands with the commonplace but it doesn't mean he's arty-farty. I mean, you've never met anybody who is as down-to-earth and practical about the art form he's working in and how he knows how to make it work and he loves it passionately and he embraces it. But it's all done from a place of sublime reality. That's what I think he deals with. It's not just reality, it's sublime reality. He is a magician, he is an alchemist. If we were in the 16th century, he would have been burned at the stake long ago. [laughter] RO: Fortunately, we're not in the 16th century. He is directing operas and he's doing one tomorrow night and the COC has just announced, they'll be coming back next year as well which is amazing news for all of us and another sign about how right they keep doing things over there these days, which is great. Anyway, it is my pleasure and my privilege to introduce you to Peter Sellars. [applause] Peter Sellars: Richard. RO: Peter, Tristan, one of the biggest works in the operatic world. PS: A monster. RO: How do you start? Where do you start? What's your point of entry? PS: Well, I started long ago when I was a teenager. This opera is so overwhelming, captivating. It's about all this yearning and love that you feel as a teenager. This music that is endlessly unresolved and endlessly kind of overwhelming and calling to all the parts of you that the rest of the world refuses to call to and... But it's not about young love. It's not about teenagers. It's actually, you have to be older to deal with it. And that's why I couldn't face it when I was a kid and I could do a lot of things when I was a kid but Tristan, no. And I had to meet Ben Heppner. The coolest thing was I got to meet Ben Heppner when I was a kid. When I was 24, my first opera gig in a real opera house with a real opera was Tannhäuser at the Chicago Lyric Opera. And it's the hardest role of all the Wagner roles. It's the killer. I mean, for the tenor. It's really a killer and I was very fortunate in that the person who sings Tristan almost never sings it, the person who's announced to sing it. It's always in the program, "So-and-so will sing Tannhäuser." PS: In fact, that person panics and does not go on and the understudy goes on because only the understudy's life is expendable. [chuckle] So, the person who sang Tannhäuser for 25 years was a man named Richard Cassily. He was never announced. There was always a more famous tenor announced and Richard sang every performance, in every opera house in the world. And he had been in all of these productions, but never really in a proper rehearsal. And I got to Richard really just at the end of his career and the first rehearsal I will never forget. He came up to me and I had list of things that he could not do. He could not stand, sit, walk, kneel. He couldn't move his neck, he couldn't move his elbow, he had gout. I'm not making this up. I mean, it was just truly... And so I thought, "Wow, that's gonna be exciting." [laughter] And I should say that this job I got, by of course, accident because the famous production of Tannhäuser that the Lyric Opera was doing from Italy, burned up in a fire in a warehouse. So, it was an emergency. They needed someone to do a quick, dirty, and cheap production in 25 minutes. PS: Amazing, I'm available [laughter] And we all have this wrestling match with Wagner, what do you do with him? And like Glenn Gould dancers, you gotta love him. There's no choice, love is the only response, to somebody who's this disturbed. [laughter] And, a lot of love is required. Tannhäuser is a total mess, and I did a production that became a little bit famous, in fact quite famous, because it was very, very erotic, extremely sexy and of course, the Midwest of America. You have a lot of nakedness on stage at the opera, they're just freaking out. And there's a little joke with the stagehands, 'cause I had a lot of naked women carrying different dragons around in the background of different people's arias, including the young Ben Heppner, who was also in his 20s. PS: And Ben was singing Volter, Vender, Volger, Vida or something. [laughter] And it was... Ben was just gorgeous. I mean, he just sang with such light in his soul, and it was so moving. And we met when we were kids, basically. And of course, the Tannhäuser, Richard Cassilly, once we started working and once he got into the part, and I suggested things that had never occurred to him in any of the 45 productions he had done of what was really going on. And I updated it, duh, because you just... All these things are real. And if you put it in the past, nobody ever thinks anything is real. And the minute you just simplify certain things... PS: So, in that production, very famous... It was done in one of these... The Crystal Cathedral. It was about televangelism and all that. But the last act was, Act 3, was in O'Hare Airport where the planes from Rome were coming in and a bunch of Christians got off. And of course for me, if you wanna do something that's just heart-rending and very, very... Set it in an airport or shopping mall, I mean, places that are just so emotionally cold, and then somebody's feeling something and they're surrounded by such coldness. And so, the warmth of a human being, feeling something, like when Elizabeth gets on her knees to pray in the middle of an airport lounge, and everyone's acting like they don't care about anything, and don't see anything, and don't feel anything, and here's this woman, feeling a lot. And I love that image always, when in public space, where none of us are ever allowed to admit that we ever feel anything or ever think anything. And when somebody in public space starts to feel something or think something, it's really powerful. PS: And so I love setting things in those kind of arid... Emotionally arid public spaces, but of course, the other thing is we work with beautiful artists who gave us the night sky, the sunset, and into the middle of the night of the sky around O'Hare Airport, with all the planes hovering in the sky. So, it was magical, it gave you all of the... For the Evening Star song, it gave you this just magical night sky, filled with things flickering, floating, and landing, and hovering, and you really got the sky filled with these celestial beings. And Richard, by then, Richard Cassilly, who was singing Tannhäuser, he got the... Wagner asks you, the tenor, to sing in a certain way because he wants to show a human being in extremist, at the farthest edge of being able to hold on, and he wants to test somebody to the maximum of what is human endurance. And so he wrote the tenor parts in his operas. PS: And most Wagner tenors are cheating and are saving, and they're not really singing everything across the night, and they're nipping and tucking, this and this and that, so they can survive the evening. And Richard was at the end of his life and had nothing to prove to anybody, and he simply gave everything. And gone was the list of everything he couldn't do. He did everything. And in that airport, that Act 3, there's a famous... The Rome narrative, when Tannhäuser sings everything he went through. It's one of those end-of-the-line Wagner things, where somebody just pours it all out and then dies. And I had all the... It was in the airport lounge, so all the Christians got off the flight from Rome, and hugged all the family members who were waiting for them and went home. And then 10 minutes later, this guy who is really, really drunk and had locked himself in the airplane bathroom came wandering out of the plane, and he raped a stewardess right there, right in the lounge. There was a stewardess walking by, he grabs her and rips her clothes off, and of course, it's Venus, duh. But that's not what he wants. PS: And he sits on one of those horrible benches where all the chairs are linked together and can't move or do anything. And drunken and a wreck, he pours his life out. And he made sounds that could not be associated with singing; sounds of human anguish, sounds of shame, sounds of, kind of suffering... That's sacred. And this man sang with courage and it was not pretty and he reached into some part of himself that you don't know you have even until you really have to look for it, and gave just a completely shattering, overwhelming, privileged performance, and it was the greatest Tannhäuser ever because someone was facing it with complete courage and complete honesty. PS: And I say all these because now, downtown, Ben Heppner is doing that with Tristan. Ben has arrived at a place in his life. He's always been a courageous performer but I've never seen anything like we've seen this last two weeks every night on stage. Ben is singing and it's not about beauty of tone. I mean, he's a profound, subtle, deep musician, so he's always singing with deep musicality but he's also, knows the Wagner is trying to touch truth that are not pretty or even attractive but are extremely painful. And as you know, with Tristan, the last 90 minutes is somebody leaving this world in a lot of pain. And the 12th century Arab philosopher, Al-Ghazali, wrote these fantastic 25 books on everything in life and book number 23, I think, is Death and the Afterlife. And it's amazing how much we don't know about death. PS: We have a lot of very sophisticated knowledge of certain things in our society but there are certain things that we actually are clueless about that other cultures have spent all their time on. For example, dying. In Tibet, they really devoted the same energy we devoted to creating the neutron bomb, understanding what is happening in the final days on earth and what happens as you leave this earth, and what the next three days are about, what the next seven weeks are about. And Al-Ghazali was in one of those cultures, where it's deeply understanding what is happening to you while you die and the way you spend your whole life preparing to die well, and then what it means to die well. PS: And obviously, it was not always this way in Western culture. I mean, Bach wrote most of his work about dying and lots of Bach cantatas are about that question, "How to die well?" and so on. But Wagner is obsessed with the last 90 minutes on earth. What is that? Al-Ghazali, the Arab philosopher described the pain of dying and said, "If you could put the pain of dying, what a human being is going through as they're dying, if you could put that pain into one drop, that single drop would melt all the mountains on earth, and they would be dust." That's what someone is going through. They're in a coma, in that hospital bed, you stand there, you don't know how to talk to them, they don't recognize you. They're not moving or they're moving a little bit or you don't know. And that's what they're going through. And Ben Heppner creates that sound. That sound of anguish, that sound that is filtered through pain, that is cleansing, that is purifying, that is terrifying, and that is the highest moment of courage in the human life and that's what you're gonna hear from this guy. RO: Peter, with a spectacular journey like that happening, and it's also, opera, as we know, is a very technical form. PS: Yes. [chuckle] RO: And this production, we'll get into in a bit, makes incredible use of video, too. But how do you, as the guide on this journey, help Ben or shape or do anything in the midst of, and there's an orchestra, and a chorus, and all the video and all of these, how do you keep to the emotional truth? PS: You know, I mean, you know this Richard, better than anyone. Directing is a service job. You're just there to be helpful. [laughter] PS: And so basically, there's just... It's all three words. "Will this help?" If the answer is no, shut up. [laughter] PS: And stay out of the way and let people do their work. And if you can think of something helpful, well, then go ahead and suggest it at the right moment, which is usually not the moment you think of it. [laughter] PS: Patience is the most important thing because, first of all, when you're working with someone like Ben... I mean, these are great artists, so they don't exactly need anyone to take them by the hand and show them around. They... I started Tristan, the first time I staged it fully in Paris was with Ben, and he was the one showing me around because he's done it all over the world for 20 years, and he knows this piece inside and out, and I did not, and he could tell me a thing or two. So, step one is, as always in life, most people in the room know more than you do, so shut up and listen. That works just about any day on any topic. PS: Then, after you listen, one of the most helpful things you can do is ask a question that maybe somebody hadn't asked before, and then Ben can find the answer. It's not about me finding the answer, it's about how would Ben answer that question? And what I'm frequently able to do with these operas that are "well-known" like Tristan, is just ask a few questions that most people haven't asked. And as you know, the more interesting the question, the more interesting the answer. And what happens in opera is usually just the questions that are being asked aren't that interesting, and so the answers that come back aren't that interesting. And the minute you just ask a way more interesting question, the performers come back with way more interesting answers. And these performers are soulful, deep, amazing people and you just need to invite them to go to a place they hadn't thought of going before. And their excitement in exploring that unknown territory is palpable. PS: What you don't wanna do is tell them what not to do, right? That's super unhelpful. You can say, "Do not pick up that glass." So every night in the performance, when the performer gets to this moment, she goes, "Oh, Peter told me not to do that." [laughter] Which is not a really satisfying performance moment. [chuckle] PS: So, what you want to do is wait and be patient and suggest things to people in a certain way that allow them to have a moment of discovery because the reason we all go to theatre is to watch human beings discover things. We say, "Now, how did they make it through this? What got them through it?" And you wanna be present at the moment where somebody... Where the light bulb goes off, where there's this moment and somebody goes, "Oh right, you could do this." And so, if you tell the performer to do that at that moment, it will always be something that they were told to do. If you don't tell them and you create the conditions where the act of discovery is theirs, every performance, that moment of discovery, is intact as a moment of discovery, and most wonderful performers will, at that moment, in that performance, on that night, discover something else in addition. But what you're doing is you're setting up a trajectory of discovery for everyone on the stage, and for the people off the stage, because one of the things I like to do is make the performance as difficult for the technicians as it is for the actors. [laughter] PS: So that everybody in the theatre is having to work very hard to pull this off, is having to look and search and hold themselves in a state of real tension and they can't say, "Oh, right, I know how this is gonna go." Every night they say, "I don't know how this is gonna go." And we all have to be 1,000% present because something's gonna happen that never happened before. And that's where, as we've discussed, I think theatre is. My favourite theatre's like sports. You know, the team goes out of the field that night, both teams go out and nobody knows what the score is going to be. I love that. Everybody's gonna give their best, but we truly don't know what will happen on the field. And you watch human beings rise to their level of greatness and their moment of courage and their moment of understanding and their moment of breakthrough. And one of the things I try and do a lot is build the staging around things people are afraid of, so that people are confronting something that they are genuinely afraid of. RO: Meaning that the actors are afraid of? Or... PS: Yep, every night. And... [laughter] PS: So that people are having to face something. Well, start with, themselves, but genuinely, every night, it takes something extraordinary to make it through the performance. RO: Give us an example. It doesn't have to be Tristan. [laughter] PS: Well, sometimes, what I do is have... An image that I have right away is a performance called "The Children of Herakles", where we did it in eight countries and it was immigration and refugees, and we took in each country 27 kids who were being held in a detention centre because they're picked up at an airport or somewhere, coming in without papers. And this was a play written by Euripides written 2,500 years ago about the problem of immigration and what you do with refugees. PS: And every night, we had, on stage, 27 kids, whose cases were pending and we had actors doing the play by Euripides. But we did something a little bit more elaborate. We had, at the beginning of the night, every night before the performance, we had for one hour... Well, it was the first half of the performance, in fact. It was at curtain time. It wasn't the pre-show, it was the show... Every night, we had border guards, people who run detention centres, immigration judges, going all the way up through the immigration services, and all the way up to ministers of the interior, in conversation with people who are living on the street, because you can be sure that... For example, one of my favourite performances was in Vienna, the Minister for the Interior of Austria, a real right-wing politician who got in attacking the rights of immigrants... Was on stage, talking to two Nigerians who were living in the street of Vienna. Now, you can be sure those people never had a conversation before. And you know this politician is talking a lot about those people but never met any of them. And life changes when you meet the person you're talking about, you've been talking about forever but you never met, and life changes when you actually meet them. PS: And so what we did is before the public conversation, we had a dinner where the Minister of the Interior sits down and has dinner with two African refugees. Again, just the most human thing on earth is breaking bread. As soon as you're breaking bread with somebody, both sides become human, and there becomes this thing that is the most important thing on earth which is equality, in what ways are we equal and how can invent further ways to recognize our equality? PS: To me, that's why culture exists is because politically, socially and economically, you can't demonstrate equality, and culturally, we can demonstrate that all people are equal. And we have to, everyday, think of new ways to do that, to convince people all over again of our equality. Anyway, this meal is a very important meal. Then those people went on stage. The conversation was chaired by journalists and then we took intermission, and then we came back for the play by Sophocles. The journalist stepped into the role of the chorus in the Greek play and then the Greek play from 2,500 years ago carried on, and they said everything that was said in the first hour except in poetry. PS: And then, at the end of the performance, we invited the audience to come across the street from the theatre where immigrants and refugees had cooked dinner and the 25 kids who were on stage were your dinner companions, and the refugee kids who you would not know how to talk to at a bus stop, and who you wouldn't get to talk to because they're in a detention centre, anyway, you're suddenly having dinner with them, and you can talk about how they got to this country, what they wanted to do here, what they hope for, what their parents thought they would do, and suddenly, you created new shared space. And to me, that's what theatre is about, is you create shared space. But you only create shared space if everybody sharing the space has to go through something they were unprepared to go through. In this case, Euripides, who wrote this play, the set up of the play is great. These kids sit on stage and watch the audience, and like any immigration hearing, they're not consulted. PS: Other people are gonna decide their fate. They're being held in some room while their fate is being debated by everybody else. So, Euripides has them just to sit there and look at the audience. And so, there's an audience watching you watch the discussion of their fate. And then, when the Greeks... And it's a complicated thing... But when the Athenians finally let them into their country and say, "Okay. Let them in", Euripides does this beautiful thing which I just have to demonstrate for a second, which is these 27 kids come off the stage and they go out to the audience because now they're part of the community, and they go out and say, "Thank you for letting me into your country. Thank you for letting me into your country", which is very intense. Many audience members refused to shake their hands, refused to touch them, and some people welcomed them, and it was this is very powerful moment. PS: And one of the things that's really important for me is that, as exemplified in the Children of Herakles, for example, when an immigrant comes before an immigration judge for their case to be heard, they cannot say what... Who they really are and what really happened to them because everybody knows we only accept one of three stories. So, if you're gonna get in, you have to lie. Meanwhile, the immigration judge has been given a list of things to tick off, so even if the immigration judge thinks this is a wonderful person, unless everyone of these predetermined boxes can be ticked off, that person is deported. So in the most important half hour of the lives of these people, both sides are lying. One of the things I thought theatre should do is create a space where there could be an honest conversation between those two people where an immigration judge could really speak from their heart and what they actually feel, whereas their job does not permit them to do. PS: And an immigrant could actually tell their real story instead of the fake story they had to use to get in. And to me, you need art in order to make a space where it's possible to simply speak the truth. Because out in the world, it's only the lies that everybody has to speak, and they have lies. So we have to create this protected zone where the truth is possible but that requires a lot of people being quite courageous. So it requires immigration judges who are willing to go on a stage and in public. The question I ask to the immigration judges is, "What keeps you up at 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning?" Not the the question they're usually asked in the newspaper. And it's amazing what people came back with. PS: It's amazing in an art project what people who were in a complex legal nightmare, where they have no space to move. In an art project, we can give people the space to move, to actually express themselves in ways that are quite amazing. One woman from Sarajevo said, "Well, in theatres here in America, United States and in France and England, the immigrants had to speak from a secret room in the basement of the theatre because they were afraid of being arrested." Mr. Sarkozy ringed the theatre that we were doing in Paris with immigration police to check IDs of people going in and out of the theatre. It's nice to know he cared. [laughter] And a woman in the basement of that theatre in Paris, an Afghan woman, said, into her microphone, as clearly she could, "We don't want your money, we just want your freedom." In America, a woman from Sarajevo said, "I'm very disturbed to see all these American flags everywhere because it's when all the flags came out in Sarajevo that the murders started." And so you have create a space where we can all talk about these things but that means it's a space that has to engage everyone in a certain type of courage, so to answer your question, Richard... [chuckle] [laughter] RO: I knew you would. PS: The actors are playing a Greek play and they're on stage, next to somebody who actually was tortured. And the person who was tortured is very modest, undemonstrative and does not wanna make a big deal of it, and in fact, doesn't even wanna talk about it. That right away, a certain level of ham-handed acting that you see in Hollywood disaster movies is not possible. The actor suddenly has to find a way deeper truth than people are finding in Zero Dark Thirty because Zero Dark Thirty is pure wall to wall. Guano. [laughter] PS: Non-stop, MSG. [laughter] PS: Not one thing in it is good for you. You are purely in the realm of artificial additives. And what it takes to get to the reality of someone who has been tortured and what the reality of torture is, is not a Hollywood disaster movie and does not move at that pace, does not move at that tempo, does not have that emotional pitch, and the actual emotional devastation of it does not create a thrilling finale. Now we're in a moment in the culture where everybody is looking for the thrill, the extra rise, the kind of lurid 'get off on it' thing. And if we're gonna be honest, we actually have to have the courage not to go there and not to create the lurid thing about torture and murdering Mr. Bin Laden, and deal with a way more human set of ways in which we're relating or not able to relate to each other. PS: So, a lot of my performances are asking people to deal with something that they don't know how to deal with, and the reason art exists is to say, "Okay, now you have the time and space to explore that, that most people don't have in real life, 'cause most people live their lives with no rehearsal. It just shows up, in your life, the catastrophe." In theatre, we have a few weeks to say how would we respond to something very very difficult, painful and deeply upsetting? And then, could we get past our first response and get to out 31st response, and get to a response that's actually way deeper and that might actually address the problem? PS: That's a privilege but you can't do it with actors who are egocentric and vain and self-absorbed. You need a group of people in the room who look outward, who want to engage, who will test themselves and ask difficult questions, and not come up with a pre-digested answer that they saw on TV or in some movie, but find the answer out for themselves and live a truth that turns out to be their truth. And let's find that and let's live in that, not just visit it, let's live there. And usually, once you find a real truth, it's a difficult one and it means you have to give up a whole bunch of stuff, because if you really hold this one thing to be true in your life, then a whole bunch of other things are no longer true. And so, that's a huge challenge, all of which is to say, it's one reason critics have a hard time with my work because I'm not interested in, putting together the neatly packaged thing where the answer is there and you can reward yourself for having guessed it. And so many, the kind of masterpiece theatre thing of, "You will be rewarded by having your fondest clichés come back to you and say, 'You're so smart, only you could have thought of me.'" PS: But the opposite is all the clichés that you ever thought of just fall away and we're all in this place where we're all... I mean, let's put it this way, the great play is like Hamlet or Tristan or whatever, are all about issues that the human race has not exactly solved across centuries. That's why what's so powerful with the The Children of Herakles to put what the Greeks were struggling with 2,500 years ago and say, "Gee, we still haven't got it right either." Across every century, the human race has struggled with these questions. So, I think it's really important to start with the... That the starting point, if you said, "What is the point of entry?" The starting point is, none of us have the answer. And so what you wanna do is get in a room with the most interesting people you can find and start asking the most interesting questions and get to a place we haven't all been to before, and see what that feels like. PS: And that's why, it goes your whole life and Tristan now, this is the 10th year, I'm working on it. And I re-staged it this last four weeks and put in a bunch of new stuff that I didn't put in before 'cause I didn't understand it before and now I understand things in a very different way and I understand more things than I first understood. And so, it's gone to a new place which is what you hope to do every morning when you wake up, you hope you're gonna have another set of ideas every day, that today is not gonna be like yesterday. You know, there's gonna be something different today that didn't happen yesterday. And the other thing that you really, as the Sufis say, "You want people who are really different." PS: "You want people who disagree with you, you want people who have a different religion, who have a different political point of view", because as the Sufis say, "It's like wishing that everybody on earth had the same face", that would be horrible. [laughter] What you want is everyone to be as different as possible, that's the human miracle. And so, to me, the staging of difference is super important, you know? And the very thing politicians are running from is actually the very gift of humanity, is that we are all really different and that's what makes the project of democracy exhilarating, is that nobody can speak for us actually, and the more we arrange for us all to speak, which, thank God, the Internet and a bunch of things are now gonna open democracy up to another place where it has never been before, where actually you can have this range of voices and range of representation that we haven't previously had. PS: And to me, one of the issues in the arts is that the arts are the last, one of the last gasps of the old ghastly, top-down, fascist empire of, "You will only see what the director of the museum wants you to see. You will only see what the director wants." And for me, it's about reversing that flow. And so, it's not about what the director wants to see, it's about, "Can we get participation at all these levels that creates something that I could never have imagined, ever?" And that's the joy. I mean the pleasure of it is... And so for me, when I look on stage and I see my own ideas, it's very depressing. And when you look on the stage and you don't know who thought of that, or it's something that you would never have proposed and there it is, that's the pleasure of being alive. RO: There's one door I wanna open and I know it will be a long journey... PS: Sorry, I should move on. Yes. Sorry. RO: No. But... And I do want to there will be time for people to ask questions, but I don't think everybody... 'Cause I didn't even get into it much in our interview, what the show is going to look like, the unique visual world of Tristan. Can you just... PS: Wow! RO: Kind of guide us into that a bit into it. PS: Yes. I totally can. Hi, everyone! Nice to see everyone tonight and please come to Tristan und Isolde It's pretty sold out, but then again, this other cool thing about it is the legend. I actually love it when people talk about something they didn't see. [laughter] Like I could just say my ideal experience is somebody sees one of my shows and the next morning, they call a really good friend and talk for one half hour. And they really hated it or they really loved it, they're both the same. All they have to do is just to talk for a half hour to someone they care about. And then, that person calls a third person and tells them about something they didn't see because the task is then, you become the artist. The person described being the experience becomes an artist and the person who has the experience described to them and then has to imagine it, becomes an artist. PS: And then the person who described the thing they didn't see to someone is an artist. And for me, that's the most powerful thing, like none of us where there at the opening night of The Rite of Spring and yet we all know what happened and we were there, and we... That's the thrill of theatre, is actually, the legend is more important than necessarily having been there. So, if you can only hear about it, that's fine, too. Just to say with Tristan, it's a pretty amazing thing because in fact, Tristan as an opera is undoable. It's a... Wagner is going outside of theatre. He doesn't want to make Tristan another opera or another night of the theatre. He knows he needs to make something sacred. He's trying to create a sacred ritual. He's trying to break out of the stranglehold of 19th century religiosity. PS: He's trying to get to something that other cultures have found. And you know, this is the early era of anthropology, right? And so anthropologists are going and discovering rituals that indigenous peoples have, all over the world. And so you're getting, after Wagner, I mean, certainly the generation that is Scriabin and Mahler, Song of the Earth, Rite of Spring. People are trying to say, "How can we get out of our overstuffed drawing rooms and get back to actually, essential parts of life and reconnect to the earth, reconnect to the sky, get to things that are primal and centre our beings spiritually in a real cosmology that is authentic?" So, Wagner is trying to create, not an opera, but a sacred ritual. PS: And he's trying to take sex which he's obsessed with, and it's the very thing that the Christian church says is evil, and he's trying to say, "No, this is the path to actual salvation and sex is sacred, and this is a path to holiness. The erotic is a path to the sacred." And now, of course, we have Tantric Buddhism now, Wagner didn't. And it was a huge, bold, dangerous thing he was trying to do, incredibly courageous, and trying to write the music that could create that path from sensuality to spiritual revelation, which is what the project to the music actually is. So it doesn't function as a show, as a play. So in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, there is no action. I mean, there's three 90-minute acts, and the entire action takes place in the last 90 seconds of each 90-minute act. [chuckle] PS: So that gives you about 83-and-a-half minutes with no staging, there's just nothing to do because all the action is internal. It's all inner voyages that people embarked on and these are the most powerful and deepest journey of your life, but they're not much fun to watch, right? I mean, that is to say when you had one of the deepest moments of your life, you were just looking out the window for a half hour, or an hour, and for you, one minute went by. For someone watching you, that hour felt like 12 hours. So, how to stage that? That's the question. How do you watch someone have an inner journey? And what you do is you invite a real artist to be in the room, which if Bill Viola. Wagner was very, very inspired by visual art, and in the case of Tristan, specifically he wrote the last part of it, living in Venice, and went everyday to the Brera Gallery where he saw a Titian painting of the Assumption of the Virgin, which is a breathtaking painting, a huge painting of this woman, going up into the sky, which is pink and orange and gold, joyous, and all the people below are sad. PS: A beautiful image of everybody, and they'll say, "Oh, it's the death of the virgin, it's the saddest day ever." And you see this woman, thrilled. Her face lit up with joy. Angels welcoming her, joyous and on earth, everyone's sad. And the colours are iridescent and magical and that's Wagner's Liebestod, that's where that music came from. That was the real inspiration. And visual artists frequently can take something like that, that you can read about. The Virgin goes to heaven but Titian giving you that pink turning into that orange, turning into that shimmering, sensuous yellow, as Titian is the most sensual painter takes you to another place. PS: So, inviting Bill Viola to plunge into this universe and people know Bill's work here. I'm sure 'cause it's shown at the gallery here a lot, but the main point is, Bill created a new art form in his lifetime. One of the generation... Wagner was always writing about the artwork of the future. Bill actually, and his colleagues, created an art form that did not exist when any of us were born, video. And video is, in fact, we've got into this before the other day, video... Television, let's face it, is the instrument of the devil, and only Bill could detox it, transform it, turn it inside out, and make it a path to spiritual eminence, which is what his works have done. And Bill, like Wagner, stretches time, he goes to the space inside of space and the time inside of time. PS: One of my favourite of his early works, which is, in a way, the most Wagnerian, it's a five-hour piece and I think I have the distinction of being the only person who's ever seen the whole thing. Bill took a home video of a two-year-old's birthday day party. A two-year-old girl, her little birthday party and her friends are there and they have hats, and there's the moment when the cake comes in and you watch these kids light up, and they blow out the candles. The video is about 20 minutes. Bill slows it down to five hours. And he takes you inside every frame, and every frame moves at the space of a slow heartbeat, though it's... And you get the time inside of time, the space inside of space, and you look into the eyes of these two-year-old kids, and you see that little girl, and she's a grandmother. PS: You see that little girl on the day she gets married. You see that little girl as a teenager. You see that little girl in her midlife crisis. You get that the book of life is already written and you're living your whole life inside of every moment, that your whole life is already pouring through every moment of your life. Your future is already there. Your past is still with you and just for a single frame, the camera catches a look in the eye of a two-year-old boy and you see the kind of husband he'll be. And you get this depth of how we're put together, which is why we have this tumult of thoughts and feelings moving through us all the time, most of which, we cannot articulate or even identify. But in fact the future is already being prepared and being played out. PS: And that's pretty Wagnerian. That's what Wagner is doing with his leitmotifs, where he's assigned different melodies to different moments in somebody's life, or different memories, or different emotions, or different associations, and then the orchestra is playing those in incredibly dense combinations across this entire five hours, so that in fact, even though the moment on stage is when someone is looking out the window, in fact, lifetimes, and previous lifetimes, and future lifetimes are all present. Or as you see in the Titian Virgin Assumption is those beings, welcoming the Virgin into Heaven, are our unborn children. They are already present. Their joy is present, their hope is present, their aspiration is with us. PS: And so that simultaneity is what opera does best, is all these things are simultaneous. Bill Viola's work proceeds in slow motion like Wagner, but it also does something that's really unusual, which is we actually don't know how long real time is, because most of us are busy, whirrrrrr, answering 45 emails, and we're late on this, and forgot about that, and we're so stressed most of the time, and we're so not in the present. So one of the things that Bill does and we spoke about this, Richard, I don't know if it's in the paper, but one of my favourite things you'll see in Act 2, at the end of Act 2, Act 2 happens in deep midnight. Well, it starts with dusk in the forest and Bill has this incredible image of pine trees in the Sierra Nevadas and you watch the sunset. It's magical. PS: And then the end of Act 2, the dawn comes up. And Bill has shot, in real time, the sun rising through an oak tree. And to stage this last 20 minutes of Act 2 of Wagner's Tristan, in an actual sunrise, and to feel real time not fake time, not theatre time, not movie time, but the actual time it takes for a sun to rise through an oak tree, 'cause of course, in life, we are surrounded every single day by more miracles than we can even take in, by more beauty than we can ever take in. Every morning, the sun rises through an oak tree. Every morning, there's more beauty than you can possibly process, and when you just stop and recognize it, that beauty illuminates everything you touch, everything you see, everything you think. And so to have Bill Viola bring that beauty of that sunrise onto the stage at that moment... But then, Richard, I don't think I mentioned this the other day... [chuckle] PS: I'm gonna tell you a secret. Bill Viola being an artist, what he actually did, was shoot a sunset and play it back in reverse. [laughter] PS: Because Tristan, at the end of it, commits suicide, and it's actually the end of his life. It's not a new beginning, it's actually an ending. And so, by showing this sunset in reverse, it has this eerie finality. And you don't know this, I mean you're some of the few people on earth who will now know this, because I don't go around saying this, but what's incredible in the theatre is you feel something. And that's what I love about art is as the audience, you feel something that you don't know is there, nobody told you. But there's something you start to feel, just because you're in the presence of something strange. That in fact, time is going backwards. In fact, a whole bunch of very intense strange experiences are occurring. Consciously, are you aware of it? No. Do you feel it? Yes. And meanwhile, Wagner's music is also moving deep in the stream of your unconscious. And it's working with the unconscious, not the conscious, that finally creates this opening into what we call "art". Because we all, every day, overstate our rational selves. Most of us claim to be rational, none of us are. And the rational self is the delusional self. [chuckle] PS: And it's better to admit how irrational you actually are, and to deal with your irrationality, which is how you make every decision you make, is from the irrational place, not from the rational place, and how you live with your irrational self and get to know it better. Art is about recognizing your irrational self, and living with it, and honouring it, and actually understanding it again as sacred, as spiritually illuminated, as a moment of knowing, that happens in my other favourite time thing which is Bill Viola's work and Wagner's work, have two types of knowledge. One is something that over a long period of time, you begin to understand. Wagner's operas get to where they get to because of the endurance. We all go through something and once you think about something across a long span of time, and are feeling something, you get to a different conclusion than you would get to if you got to it quick and conclusion, right? And we all know what it is in our lives to stop breathing quickly ha-ha-ha-ha, start breathing slowly, and you start feeling things differently. PS: And you start understanding your own emotions differently when you just slow down the heartbeat and create spaciousness in your emotional life. But the other side of it which, as you know, Richard we talked about tonight, which I love in theatre, is all theatre exists for moments. For me, an evening of theatre has three moments that are magical, electric and revelatory. And it's that moment where you understand all of life in one glimpse. Can you explain it later? No. But for an instant, everything became so clear, so vivid. You saw right through it, into the heart of it. PS: For one instant, all these things in the universe actually were in incredible alignment and then it's gone. You know it exists. That evanescence in theatre, that moment that will never come again, all of this existed to just make that instant overwhelmingly alive, and different people have those across different moments in the night where suddenly, all aligns. And that kind of knowledge, the knowledge that comes from the moment of recognition, the instant recognition that's outside of time, just as the slow, gradual recognition which is also out of time, those are the two types of understanding that we're trying to give you the space to feel and recognize in theatre. RO: Let's see if I can get some people to at least ask a couple of questions. PS: I wanna ask questions of this guy, this guy is the genius. [laughter] S?: Now, do you think there's still a place in an opera company's repertoire for the more traditional productions or should they continue sort of dragging the audience, kicking and screaming into the 21st century? PS: You know for me there's no difference between old and new, there's only good and bad. [chuckle] [applause] PS: And there's good old and bad old, and there's good new and bad new, right? It just has nothing to do... It's like judging somebody by what they look like. I don't care what someone looks like, I wanna know who they are and none of us are who we look like. None of us are who people think we are, we are all someone else, and that means you just got to take the time to get to know me, and I have to take the time to get to know you. And so, I've seen traditional productions that are moving, heartbreaking, illuminatory and visionary, and I've seen the opposite. PS: It's not about what it looks like, it's about deeper things, what it feels like, how profoundly engaged are the artists in what they're doing? And to me, the form itself is not that important. And you get... It's like judging your grandparents because they're not young. I mean, of course they're not young, so they're older, thank God! And you wanna honour that and recognize that and recognize what they have. Are you gonna ask them to run a marathon? No. Are you gonna ask them to do what they could do better than anyone else? Yes. Are you gonna recognize whatever human being is here to offer, which is something different and stop using same yardstick for everyone? PS: Again, equality is based on how different we are, not that we're all the same. And so what you want is as many different points of view as possible and the definition of a masterpiece is that it continues to mean new things to different people. And what is not a masterpiece is something that has to be done in its own period under very specific circumstances or else it falls apart. And every generation finds it's Hamlet, every generation find... Because Hamlet says a lot more than Shakespeare thought it said. The definition of a great work of art is it means more than the author imagined. S?: Thank you. RO: Sir? S?: Hi. First, I just wanted to thank you for making the time for being here tonight. You're a total trip, like it's a lot of fun, just taking the journey with you through talking about art. [laughter] [applause] S?: So, a couple of things I wanted to ask or did to... If you could take our heads to... One has to do with talking about the nature of art, and what you said, actually, it replicates what [inaudible] used to say about music, right? "There's good, there's bad, there's no in between." Regarding art and creativity, and you've had a panorama of experiences, I'm curious to know, where do you go to actually clear your head before you go and take on these challenges? Because they're monumental and they're... Just as you were talking about heldentenors who are incapable of actually stepping up to the plate to perform, the same is true, sir, with the type of work you do. It's no simple feat. And so I'm just curious where you go, and a question for the two of you... Thanks again, Richard, for doing this. I just wanna know just for the hell of it, guilty pleasures, share some of your guilty pleasures with us. Thank you. [laughter] PS: This is gonna get lurid. [laughter] PS: One of the most important things in my life is to spend, hopefully, most of my time, not in a rehearsal room and not in a theatre. So, a lot of my life these last few years, this year is in Africa, I particularly try every other year to go to the Congo, every other year to be in Ethiopia, to be in South Africa, to be... And I've just, this last two years, started going to Beirut a lot, and to be in places where history is actually being made where these are all real issues. You know, it's one thing for people living nice comfortable lives to stage a Brecht play about war, it's another thing to be in Mali right now. And I've spent a lot of the last two years in Mali, and so I'm getting a different war report than the BBC is broadcasting. PS: And what it means when you are yourself with people who are going through very intense life-changing experiences and are themselves creating new history, then you come back to rehearsal room, first of all, with gratitude, that such a thing even exists, and with a deep, deep-seated sense of "its urgent", to be able to find and communicate new truths, and to say certain things aloud that a whole bunch of people do not have a microphone to say. So, to me, it's always important in your life to keep what is urgent and what is not urgent very clear, and to recognize what theatre was invented to do, which is a way to say difficult things without hurting anyone and a way to introduce something that needs to be introduced to thinking-feeling people. PS: Though that is a very big part of my life and I don't wanna exaggerate it and be melodramatic, I just wanna say that's what I do as a refresher. And when you're in Eastern Congo, you, first of all, learn the beauty of human beings because here are people who should not still be alive and they are alive. The city I go to, I go to support the work of an artist named Faustin Linyekula, is Kisangani, and as many of you may know, it's the kind of city of tears in Africa. At least two million people were killed there in 2001, 2002. And the city is, every single building is burned, broken, and every single family lost people and the Congo River there is a mass grave. And there, people care about peace because they've seen the opposite. PS: And the healing process and what it takes to heal and what it does mean to have productive, meaningful work for a new generation is very, very, very vivid. And it's a place where, until very recently, there weren't many white people 'cause all the NGO's left, and so it was a very quiet place. No trucks, no... It's just bicycles and people walking. And you have to get serious about all the issues of life and you're still living with all the issues of death. So, those kind of experiences are very clarifying and also, I do spent a lot of time with indigenous artists and in indigenous communities and again, where people are dealing with recovery issues that are extremely serious. And what it means to put back together ceremony, is gone. And what it means that in our generation, we need to invent the ceremonies again. All of us, indigenous, non-indigenous. What place are each of us indigenous? How do we get back to that self? PS: And meanwhile, how do we go forward to the new self which is, as you know, there are more native people in the Americas than there ever were now. These communities are actually back at strength and their kids have options that kids in those communities never had ever. Like five centuries ago, 10 centuries ago, ever. We're in this magnificent thing of indigenous kids being online and part of the latest scientific technology and having an ancient technology that they are also the inheritors of. And we are alive on earth at a magnificent moment. I mean, it's the most thrilling moment in the history of the planet to be alive when these knowledges are meeting and if I could also say, when women are stepping forward and in leadership positions in communities all over the planet for the first time in human history. We are at the cusp of a completely new era in human existence and it is exhilarating to be here. 1 PS: And so, when you just inhale that and then you get to rehearse something or you get to present something or you get to shape something or you get to propose something, it is a sheer privilege. And there's a lot to do and there's a lot to talk about. And there's a lot of work ahead of all of us. The important thing is to counteract the media which keeps presenting everything as a negative story, present everything instead, which is what Wagner does in Tristan, maximum amount of suffering. But that suffering is not futile or meaningless. It's actually a path toward recognition. As the Navajos say, "Pain is a teacher and a guidance. Pain is telling you, 'Hello, you're holding your hand in a fire. Don't keep your hand in the fire and take a pain killer.'" [chuckle] PS: Recognize the pain is just a message, telling you about something else and leading you to something else. And recognize that this period that we're living in has these, of course, a lot of shocking things going on. That is actually the movement required towards deep change because no meaningful change happens until there's blood on the altar. No meaningful change happens until you had to give something up. No meaningful change happens until you had to face something you couldn't face. And finally, you make change in your life. All the other stuff is just talk. Meaningful change happens when we face something that is overwhelming and unbearable, and we're being set up for real change. And that is, again, a sacrament. It is actually a path to the sacred and we're all going to have to face it. Guilty pleasure. S?: That's it. PS: [laughter] Guilty pleasure, Richard. My guilty pleasure is knowing this guy. I'm sorry. I talked with him for 45 minutes the other day and I feel like I've known him for 45 years. Thank you. [chuckle] PS: And thank you for just pouring your water upon the... Your bread upon the waters. People hear from you more than they hear from me so I'm sorry. I talked too much tonight but you get revenge next week. But let me just say... [laughter] PS: Thanks for coming out, everyone. And I will just mention, one thing is, I am coming back to Toronto next season, as Richard said, and that's the project I really want people to come to. It's Handel's Hercules. We did it for the first time last year in Chicago with veterans coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq. It is a really overwhelming project, a baroque opera meeting, post-traumatic stress, in a very real way. And in fact, what people didn't get is why this music has to repeat and in fact, you perform this music for soldiers and it enters their lives in just incredible ways. And just to say very simply, in Chicago, when we worked on it, one-third of homeless people in America are soldiers, are people whose lives were destroyed and they couldn't put them back together again and they're living on the street. And so a lot of our work, we do this... We're preparing and rehearsing Hercules, Handel's oratorio, was in homeless shelters in West Chicago, and we worked across the whole city with a lot of veterans. And to have an opera performance, to attend an opera performance with soldiers, is a really profound experience. PS: I have a marine here, a countertenor for the first time. When that person started singing, I thought it was the sound of blood coming out of his mouth. Now, they don't tell you that in music appreciation class. When one of the veterans said, couldn't stop at the end of the performance, he was really weeping and weeping. And the thing that moved him were the supertitles. He said, "All my life, I'm thinking these things but I can't say them and nobody who sees me knows that I'm thinking them. I can't believe that I just saw people's thoughts projected on a large wall and finally, everyone can see what they're thinking." So, again, for me, one of the privileges at this time is to use the arts to open up these closed spaces and to find that we all share, in very unexpected ways, a lot. And weirdly, it's the form of opera, in the form of theatre, this thing that was unnecessary, that turns out to be the necessary thing. RO: Peter, thank you. [applause]