When last we checked in on Stravinsky's "Histoire du Soldat," as told by Peter Sellars, it was at the Ojai Festival in 1992. There was a volatile sociocultural buzz in the Angeleno air at the time: The festival unfolded just a few months after the post-Rodney King riots. Sellars seized the opportunity to translate that energy to the otherwise placid, idyllic stage of Ojai's Libbey Bowl, and into the short music-theater fable of the Soldier, the Devil and the game played between them.
While French conductor Pierre Boulez led a compact ensemble from the Los Angeles Philharmonic through Stravinsky's famously diverse score to one side of the stage, Sellars filled the rest of it with an African American cast retooling the original text in rap rhetoric, dance choreographed by Donald Byrd, and with a pickup truck on the stage for good measure. Not everyone was amused or enlightened--least of all a chorus of sneering mainstream critics--by this radical revision of Stravinsky's small but visionary 1918 work. But others were suitably dazzled by the sheer audacity, the sensory verve and the timing of the thing.
This week at the Music Center, Sellars returns to "Histoire du Soldat," again with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, this time led by Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Times have changed, and so has the context. For one thing, the name has been translated to a user-friendly "The Story of a Soldier." And Sellars has drawn on Mexican and Chicano street theater to energize and localize the piece, an idea that grew out of working on a new version of the Jean Genet epic "The Screens," staged a year ago at the East L.A. Skills Center in Lincoln Heights. Sellars asked poet Gloria Alvarez, who was involved with the Genet adaptation, to concoct a new bilingual text for the Stravinsky. Supertitles will be in both English and Spanish, to make the text clear in both tongues. In conceiving the new "Soldier," Sellars also extended the Genet connection and cast the Soldier, Alex Miramontes, and the Devil, Omar Gomez, from among the "Screens" players. Chicano artist Gronk, another "Screens" veteran, provides the sets, and choreographer Donald Byrd is a holdover from the Ojai edition.
The Ojai production, says Sellars, back in L.A. after nearly a year on the road with his Chinese opera epic "The Peony Pavilion," "was a very logical response to what was going on--the city was so militarized at that time." The same currency, and a topical setting, marks the new production: "You will smell that it is directly from the streets of this city," Sellars says.
The nuevo "Soldier" will coalesce in just weeks, in an improvisatory, on-the-fly manner that, like his insistence on local color, is particularly fitting for Stravinsky's work. Written with Swiss novelist C.F. Ramuz under duress during World War I, "Story of a Soldier" comes with clear instructions from the composer: "I . . . encourage producers to localize the play."
Sellars clearly has taken that blessing to heart, and then some. His current libretto places the action in the present, in Los Angeles and Mexico, and word has it that current events in Iraq will make it into the fabric of the new text.
"Almost unlike any other Stravinsky piece," says Sellars, "it was written under the pressure of a specific political situation, which is: 'Here we are in war conditions in this little town. As artists, we should just get mobilized. Let's put together a show. We have a wagon and a little band.'
"It's Igor--not creating this gigantic ballet for the Champs-Elysee Theater--but the opposite. It's Igor saying, 'My God, we're in the middle of a war. We have no budget. Circumstances are serious and, as artists, we have to make a contribution.' "
His version, Sellars insists, "is the same deal. You get the feeling of: 'We can make a contribution. Let's get out there.' It's direct action, as they say. We have a--what do you call it?--a quick-response unit," he says and laughs.
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In fact, some members of Sellars' quick-response unit have been thinking about this project for about a year.
Gronk, born Glugio Gronk Nicandro and raised in East Los Angeles, first worked with Sellars on last year's Genet production. And the Stravinsky project isn't Gronk's only foray into musical collaboration. Two years ago, he was involved in the premiere of "Tormenta Cantata," in which the Kronos Quartet played composer Joseph Julian Gonzalez's score, joined by a soprano who faces away from the audience, just as the female figure Tormenta in Gronk's paintings faces away from the viewer.
The musicians were guided by the ad hoc "baton" of a specially amplified brush that Gronk used to paint a canvas, onstage and in tempo.
