Welcome to the Humanities Initiative

Sunday April 15, 2007

The Morning Program

11:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., 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.

The Evening Program

Aurea: War Music
Sunday, April 15, 2007, 8:00 p.m.
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.