War Music: Recent Stabs at the Epic

NYU’s First Humanities Festival

Sunday April 15, 2007
From 11:00am to 5:30pm
at Warren Weaver Hall, 251 Mercer Street at West 4th

• George Hearn renders Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels
  (The Battle of Gettysburg as an American The Iliad)
• Greil Marcus rings changes on Bob Dylan’s Masters of War
• Yusef Komunyakaa and Chad Gracia channel Gilgamesh
  (with actors from the Classical Theater of Harlem, directed by J Kyle Manzay)
• Lawrence Weschler contemplates Balkan Epics Running Rampant
• Laura Slatkin considers Gender in The Iliad
• The Aquila Theater Company samples Robert Fagles’s The Iliad translation

all as a way of seeding the ground for

Aurea: War Music

{six chamber musicians and five actors out of Providence, RI, offer the New York premiere of a thrilling new stage adaptation of Christopher Logue’s astonishing revisioning of Homer’s The Iliad}

8 pm
Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
New York University, 566 LaGuardia Place (Washington Square South)

Tickets will be free and available starting at 6pm on day of the performance at the Skirball Center Box Office.

All events free and open to the public.

Full schedule and further details at www.nyu/edu/fas/institute/nyih.

The Evening Program
Aurea: War Music

Sunday evening, April 15, 2007, 8 pm
Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
New York University
566 LaGuardia Place (Washington Square South)

With thrilling contemporary imagery and cinematic language, War Music, Christopher Logue’s adaptation of Homer’s The Iliad easily stakes its claim as one of the most significant poetic achievements of the late 20th century (indeed, “the best translation of Homer since Pope’s, according to Garry Wills). Using this brimmingly vivid work as its wellspring, Aurea (an innovative Providence-based ensemble of six musicians and five actors, loosely grouped around Brown University) presents the New York premiere of its most ambitious project to date—a multi-disciplinary performance that combines live music, movement, narration, and theatre. To distill the essence of Logue’s work into theatrical form, Aurea commissioned director Elena Araoz to adapt the poem, and composer and conductor Paul Phillips to create original songs and instrumental music. In collaboration, choreographer Kimberly Dilts and director Araoz create a stylized physical language with which legendary human characters such as Paris, Helen, Hector, and Achilles, not to mention the ever-meddling, ever-quarrelsome Olympian gods, all find fresh and immediate expression. The result is a rich theatrical and musical journey that unites and illuminates the ancient and modern worlds.

Founded in 2002 by actor Nigel Gore, violist Consuelo Sherba, violinist Charles Sherba, and harmonica virtuoso Chris Turner, Aurea takes its name from Catena Aurea Homeri, or The Golden Chain of Homer in the nomenclature of eighteenth-century esoteric alchemy, which strove for the refinement of the human condition. That alchemy—combining disparate elements into a divine new substance—defines the aspiration of every Aurea event.

Those wishing further information or interviews with Aurea should contact its directors:

Consuelo Sherba: Consuelo_Sherba@Brown.edu; 401-258-8397
Nigel George: ogron2@aol.com; 401-741-3234

or the composer/music director: Paul Phillips, paul_phillips@brown.edu; 401-338-1383

About NYU’s Skirball Center

NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, located off of Washington Square South at 566 LaGuardia Place, provides a large-scale, professional performance space for university productions and events and live professional performances from around the world. The 860-seat theater (which opened in October 2003) hosts the only major university-based professional performing arts presenting program in Manhattan.

The Center presents theater, dance, music, music theater, and opera, solo performance, comedy, video, film, and public affairs events. Its mission is to serve the NYU community while building young audiences (age 18 – 30) for live performance by reaching out to them with a broad range of world-class, forward-thinking work at low ticket prices.

The Skirball Center is located at 566 LaGuardia Place at Washington Square South. For a complete listing of events happening at the Skirball Center, go to www.skirballcenter.nyu.edu.

The earlier daytime program
Sunday, April 15
11:00am to 5:30 pm, Warren Weaver Hall, NYU

George Hearn, the Tony Award winning star of Sweeney Todd and Sunset Boulevard, among many others, reads from Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel of Gettysburg reconceived as the great foundational American epic, The Killer Angels.

Greil Marcus, the renowned cultural critic and author, most recently, of The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, traces the remarkable life and afterlife of Bob Dylan’s seminal protest masterpiece, Masters of War.

Yusef Komunyakaa, Distinguished Senior Poet at NYU and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, reads from his own war-inflected poetry and unveils passages from the new translation of Gilgamesh upon which he collaborated with Chad Gracia (concept and dramaturgy), here given a partial reading by members of the Classical Theater of Harlem, as directed by J Kyle Manzay.

Lawrence Weschler, director of the NYIH/NYU and longtime New Yorker staff writer, draws on such of his recent books as Vermeer in Bosnia and Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences (the latter a finalist for this year’s National Book Critics’ Circle Award), to consider the stymied transition from the epic to the tragic in the Balkans.

Laura Slatkin, a professor of classics with NYU’s Gallatin School and the author of The Power of Thetis (Harvard University Press) will probe the role of gender in The Iliad.

Members of the renowned Aquila Theater Company, permanent company in residence at the Center for Ancient Studies at NYU, will read from the first books of Robert Fagles’s widely praised translation of The Iliad, thereby offering a contrast to Christopher Logue’s treatment of the same material later that evening in the Aurea performance.

Schedule of Events

To arrange interviews or for further information on the New York Institute for the Humanities, call 212-998-2100 or visit www.nyu.edu/fas/institute/nyih.

The NYU Humanities Initiative sponsors research, collaborative teaching, conferences, working groups, and outreach by way of fostering a university-wide community in the humanities at NYU. Launched in 2007, its mission replaces and significantly expands that of the former Humanities Council. For further information on the Humanities Initiative, visit www.nyu.edu/humanities.council or call 212 998-2190.

The NYU Humanities Festival is an annual event designed to bring humanists, artists, and members of the NYU and NYC communities together in order to reflect on the significance of the humanities in our lives.

The Humanities Initiative and the New York Institute for the Humanities would like to thank the Office of the Provost for the generous support of the Humanities Festival.

The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU was established in 1976 for promoting the exchange of ideas between academics, professionals, politicians, diplomats, writers, journalists, musicians, painters, and other artists in New York City-and between all of them and the city. It currently comprises 186 fellows. Throughout the year, the NYIH organizes numerous public events and symposia.