SPOLETO: Talking Gullah, talking Amistad from Dan Conover on Vimeo.

There are plenty of reasons to pay attention to Amistad this season. It’s an opera — which always means a high profile at Spoleto USA — it’s leading things off with this year’s eve-of-the-festival preview, it christens the restored Memminger Auditorium, and the festival staff has clearly invested a lot of energy in building a program of related events around the production.

Earlier today I toted the camera down to Memminger Auditorium for a meet-the-press session with some of the big guns from Amistad. I came away fairly well impressed by the creative commitment I saw on display there.Conductor Emmanuel Villaume, Director Sam Helfrich, Set Designer Caleb Hale Wertenbaker and Lighting Director Peter West opened up the presentation, with composer Anthony Davis arriving soon after.

And the two take-aways for me were both good:

1. At a technical level, the group has clearly made a real effort to make full creative use of the opportunities afforded by the spectacular new Memminger. If you remember the last time we saw it, Memminger looked like some dystopian futurist’s nightmare: A decaying landmark devoid of comforts, retrofitted by a thousand compromises to stage a sprawling kunju opera. Amistad, by contrast, will make use of an enormous black-box theater space. This is going to be opera in the round, folks, something few of us have ever seen.
2. The subject is slavery, and history, and America, and Africa, and it sounds very much as if everyone involved has been sincerely thinking about those subjects for some time now. With topics so big and emotional, Amistad promises to be, at the very least, a thought-provoking piece of art. Sam Helfrich says it’s part of his job to make sure people leave the theater talking. Sounds like he’s well on his way.

I asked them if there was a message in this work that they discussed in their preparations, and Villaume and Helfrich assured us there was no agenda. But I think it’s safe to say, judging by their comments, that this will be a challenging experience for opera-goers who like their art abstract and held-at-arms-length.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 8:53 pm and is filed under Music, News, Opera, Performers, Video.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.