CONVERSATION SERIES: INTERROGATIONS OF FORM A ROOM IN INDIA: ARTIST TALK Friday, December 8, 2017 at 6:00pm Veterans Room Thompson Arts Center at Park Avenue Armory Featuring:
Ariane Mnouchkine Tony Kushner David Remnick
SEASON SPONSORS
PRODUCTION SPONSORS
A Room in India is made possible by generous grants from the Howard Gilman Foundation, The Reed Foundation, the Howard and Sarah D. Solomon Foundation, and with the support of MAIF, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, Institut Français and the City of Paris. The production is also supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the city council, and from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Support for Park Avenue Armory’s artistic season has been generously provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Altman Foundation, The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, the Achelis and Bodman Foundation, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, The Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Foundation, the Marc Haas Foundation, The Kaplen Brothers Fund, the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, and the Isak and Rose Weinman Foundation. Cover image: James Ewing
MEET THE PARTICIPANTS ARIANE MNOUCHKINE TONY KUSHNER Ariane Mnouchkine is the director of theatre company Théâtre Born in New York City, in 1956, and raised in Lake Charles, du Soleil, which she founded in 1964 with her fellows of the ATEP (The Theatre Association of the Students of Paris). In 1970, Théâtre du Soleil created 1789 at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, where Giorgio Strehler warmly welcomed the young company and gave them his support. The company then went on to choose its home at the Cartoucherie, a former bulletmaking factory, in the Bois de Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris. The Cartoucherie enabled the troupe to expand on the notion of theater simply as architectural institution and allowed them to focus on the concept of theater being a place of haven rather than just complying with the traditional architectural notions of a building, and all this at a time when urban change and development in France was transforming the place of man and of theater in the city. In the Cartoucherie, Théâtre du Soleil found the necessary tools to create and present the type of popular yet high-quality theater dreamed of by Jean Vilar. The troupe invented new ways of working and collectively devising work, its aim being to establish a new relationship with its audience and distinguish itself from bourgeois theater in order to create a high-quality theater for the people. From the 1970s onwards, the troupe became one of France’s major theater companies, both because of the number of artists working in it (more than seventy people a year) and because of its glowing international reputation. Attached to the notion of the theater troupe as tribe or family, Mnouchkine established the ethics of the group on certain basic foundations: everyone working at all levels, everyone on the same wage, and on stage, the definitive casting only decided upon once many different actors have tried out many different roles. Today, Théâtre du Soleil is one of the last theater companies in Europe to continue to function in such a way.
Louisiana, Kushner is best known for his two-part epic, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and Caroline, or Change. He is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, an Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a PEN/Laura Pels Award, a Spirit of Justice Award from the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, a Cultural Achievement Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, a Chicago Tribute Literary Prize for lifetime achievement, the 2012 National Medal of the Arts, and the 2015 Lifetime Achievement in the American Theater Award, among many others. His recent work includes a collection of one-act plays entitled Tiny Kushner, and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures.
DAVID REMNICK David Remnick was named the editor of The New Yorker in
1998. He joined the magazine in 1992, after ten years with the Washington Post, where he was the Moscow bureau chief. He is the author of several books, including “The Bridge,” “King of the World,” and “Lenin’s Tomb,” for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Under Remnick’s leadership, The New Yorker has become the country’s most honored magazine, winning forty-one National Magazine Awards and, in a first for a magazine, three Pulitzer Prizes.
NEXT IN THE SERIES CARRIE MAE WEEMS: THE SHAPE OF THINGS Sunday, December 17 from 12:00pm to 10:00pm
Armory artist-in-residence Carrie Mae Weems curates this day-long convening that critiques the history of violence and questions the shape of things to come in the context of our current political state. She has assembled like-minded contemporary artists, writers, poets, musicians, and social theorists to join her to critique our tumultuous political and social climate through a series of readings, performances, conversations, and other artistic responses.
LOOKING BACK: 1968 LOOKING FORWARD: 2018 Sunday, February 17 at 12:00pm, 3:00pm, and 6:00pm
Artists, thinkers, activists, academics, and community leaders gather for a symposium of conversations, performances, and open studios exploring artistic, social, and political perspectives on the 50th anniversary of the extraordinary world-changing events of 1968 and the promise of the next fifty years.
armoryonpark.org