Entre Nous: Art as Social Action with Peter Sellars and Yasmine Seale

A conversation with Peter Sellars and Yasmine Seale at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 25/01/2024 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
How can a director’s choices bring fresh perspectives to centuries-old operas and plays? What kinds of creative processes do theater directors engage with as they plan their productions? And, more generally, how can the arts act as catalysts for social change? The Library is delighted to welcome Peter Sellars, one of the leading living figures of theatrical history. From setting Così fan tutte in a diner in Cape Cod and The Marriage of Figaro in a luxury apartment in Trump Tower), to having worked with artists such as Warhol and received praise from critics such as Edward Said, Sellars’ groundbreaking stagings of classical and contemporary operas and plays have made him one of the most compelling director of our times. Discover his method of breaking into art, forging a theater of the present.
Sellars will speak in conversation with writer and translator Yasmine Seale.
About the speakers:
Peter Sellars is an internationally acclaimed director. He is best known for his innovative interpretations of operatic masterpieces. Since 1988, Sellars has been a professor at UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures / Dance. His production of Vincenzo Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda will be performed Opéra Bastille in February and March of 2024. Book your tickets here!
Yasmine Seale is a writer whose work includes poetry, criticism, translation and visual art. Her essays on literature, art and film have appeared in many places, including Harper’s, The Nation, Paris Review, and the Times Literary Supplement. Among her books are Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi (Tenement Press), a collaboration with Robin Moger, and The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton), described by the New Yorker as “an electric new translation”. She is currently a fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
The Entre Nous series is co-organized by Columbia Global Centers | Paris, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, and the American Library in Paris.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.