Rime of the Ancient Mariner
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BAM 2013 Next Wave Festival #RimeoftheAncientMariner Brooklyn Academy of Music Alan H. Fishman, Chairman of the Board William I. Campbell, Vice Chairman of the Board Adam E. Max, Vice Chairman of the Board Karen Brooks Hopkins, President Joseph V. Melillo, Executive Producer The Rime of the Ancient Mariner By Samuel Taylor Coleridge Directed by Phyllida Lloyd BAM Harvey Theater Dec 10—12, 17—19 at 7:30pm Dec 13, 14, 20, 21 at 7pm & 9pm Dec 15, 22 at 3pm Approximate running time: 45 minutes, no intermission BAM 2013 Next Wave Festival sponsor Performers Fiona Shaw Daniel Hay-Gordon Diverse Voices at BAM sponsored by Composition and sound design by Mel Mercier Time Warner Inc. Lighting design by Jean Kalman and Mike Gunning Additional support provided by Set design by Chloé Obolensky Jon & NoraLee Sedmak Choreography by Kim Brandstrup Major support for theater at BAM provided by: The Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund The SHS Foundation The Shubert Foundation, Inc. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ADDITIONAL PRODUCTION CREDITS Sound engineers Veronique Haddelsey and Danve Sanderson Assistant designer Matt Deely Assistant designer Malika Chauveau Stage manager Emma Cameron Producer Claire Béjanin Producer Taylor Thomson SYNOPSIS In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem in seven sections, a mariner who had just returned from sea tells a wedding guest the tale of his strange voyage of hardship and curious events. His ship encounters a savage storm and is stuck in ice. He shoots an albatross that had trailed the ship. The wind stills and the ship becomes stranded, immobile. Its parched crew hangs the dead bird around the mariner’s neck, a symbol of lost salvation and guilt. A ghost ship appears and its two ghostly passengers win the souls of his crew on a gamble. After a series of more mysterious events, including a renewal in faith, the mariner eventually returns to shore, where he is compelled to wander and recount his story again and again. ABOUT SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772—1834) was born in Devonshire, England, the youngest of a vicar’s 13 children. He studied at Jesus College, Cambridge University, and pursued politics with an idealistic fervor, espousing the ideals of the French Revolution. He became friends with poet Robert Southey; they envisioned forming a type of commune based on egalitarian principles. It never came to fruition, but the tenets would help shape his ensuing philosophy, including a renewed appreciation of nature. With fellow poet William Wordsworth, Coleridge started the English Romantic movement; they published Lyrical Ballads (1798), which began with Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and closed with Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey. He immersed himself in the writings of German thinkers, such as Kant and Schlegel, and absorbed influences from German Romanticism. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey wound up living near one another in the northern British Lake District, earning them a moniker, the Lake Poets. In addition to his poetry, he was a revered literary critic and lecturer. Considered a great intellectual as well as a magnetic personality, Coleridge also suffered from weaknesses that influenced his oeuvre: drowsing from the effects of opium prescribed for rheumatism and ill health, he imagined one of his renowned poems, Kubla Khan, only to have much of it recede from memory while his transcription of it was interrupted. Nonetheless, it emerged as one of his great achievements, alongside Rime. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Fiona Shaw and Daniel Hay-Gordon. Fiona Photo: Robert Hubert Smith Who’s Who FIONA Shaw, one of the UK’s most celebrated stage actresses, trained at RADA where she was awarded the Bancroft Gold Medal. Her work in New York includes Medea at BAM for which she won an Obie; it transferred to Broadway where she was nominated for a Tony Award. Additional productions include The Waste Land (New York Critics Award); Death, Destruction and Detroit; My Life is a Fairy Tale (Lincoln Center Festival); and Happy Days and John Gabriel Borkman at BAM. Last spring she performed in The Testament of Mary on Broadway which received three Tony nominations. In London she recently performed in London Assurance, Mother Courage, and Scenes from an Execution at the National Theatre, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (dir. Phyllida Lloyd) which toured to Greece. Other major stage productions include, at the National Theatre: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Way of the World both directed by Phyllida Lloyd; Richard II; Hedda Gabler (London Critics Award); The Good Person of Szechuan (Laurence Olivier Award and Evening Standard Drama Award for Best Actress); and Stephen Daldry’s Machinal (Olivier Award). Shaw performed in a world tour of The Waste Land; Mother Courage (dir. Deborah Warner); The Rivals; Bloody Poetry and Philistines; Les Liaisons Dangereuses; Mephisto; Much Ado About Nothing; The Mer- chant of Venice; Hyde Park; and The Taming of the Shrew for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and The Seagull (dir. Peter Stein). She received the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Rosalind, and received an Olivier Award and a London Critics Award for the role of Electra. Film credits include: My Left Foot, Mountains of the Moon, The Butcher Boy, Three Men and a Little Lady, The Last September, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, The Black Dahlia, and the Harry Potter films. On television, her many roles include Hedda Gabler, The Waste Land, Richard II, Persuasion, Gormenghast, and True Blood for HBO. She has directed four operas including, recently, The Rape of Lucretia (Glyndbourne). Shaw was awarded doctorates from the National University of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin. The French government has awarded her an Officier de l’ordre des Artes et des Lettres, and she has received a CBE from the Brit- ish government. DANIEL Hay-GORDON, born in London, trained in ballet and contempo- rary dance at Rambert, graduating in 2009. He has worked as a freelance dancer and performer throughout Europe and the US, working with compa- nies including English National Ballet, Rambert, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, National Dance Company Wales, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, and English National Opera. Hay-Gordon has performed for and with many different artists including choreographers, directors, writers, musicians, and actors: Deborah Warner, Fiona Shaw, Darshan Singh Bhuller, Itzik Galili, Kim Brandstrup, Nigel Charnock, Aletta Collins, Joanna Fong, Jonathan Lunn, Garry Clarke, Andonis Foniadakis, Wayne McGregor, Scott Walker, Simon Rattle, and the Berlin Philharmonic, Phyllida Lloyd, Sophie Bevan, Tom Dixon, Bill T. Jones, Tobias Picker, and Oliver Sachs. He also creates his own work for stage and film. He recently co-established Impermanence Dance Theatre, makes short dance films for YouTube and is currently curating and performing in cabaret evenings in London and Berlin. Who’s Who Phyllida Lloyd (director) has directed the Mercier has performed and recorded with pianist films The Iron Lady (Pathe/DJ Films/ Film Four), and composer Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin and with Mamma Mia! (Universal Pictures), and Gloriana many other leading Irish traditional musicians for a Film (TV) (Illuminations Films). London theater more than 30 years. Throughout the 1980s he includes: Josephine and I (Bush Theatre), Six performed in Europe and the US with John Cage Degrees of Separation, Hysteria, Wild East and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (Royal Court), The Threepenny Opera, Boston (Roaratorio, Inlets, Duets). Recent composition Marriage (Donmar Warehouse), Mary Stuart in theater includes Sétanta (Irish Times Theatre (Donmar Warehouse, Apollo, and Broadway Award nom., Fibín/Abbey Theatre); Happy in 2009), Julius Caesar (Donmar Warehouse Days (NT; European tour; Washington, DC; and and St Ann’s Warehouse, NY), The Rime of the BAM); Julius Caesar (Barbican, Paris, Madrid, Ancient Mariner (Old Vic Tunnels), The Way of Luxembourg); Fewer Emergencies (Royal Court the World, Pericles, What the Butler Saw, The Theatre); Medea (Drama Desk nom., Abbey, Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Duchess of Malfi West End, Broadway, Paris). (Royal National Theatre), Artists and Admirers, The Virtuoso (RSC), and Mamma Mia! (London, JEAN KALMAN (lighting designer), born in Paris Broadway, and worldwide). Opera: La Bohème, in 1945, has worked extensively as a designer, Medea, Carmen, L’Etoile, Gloriana, Albert lighting designer, and visual artist for dance, the- Herring, Peter Grimes (Opera North), Macbeth ater, and opera since 1979. He has collaborated (Paris/ROH), The Handmaid’s Tale (Copenhagen, for stage productions with directors Peter Brook, ENO, and Toronto), and The Carmelites, Verdi’s Lev Dodin, Deborah Warner, Richard Eyre, Rob- Requiem, Rhinegold, Valkyrie, Siegfried, and ert Carsen, Adrian Noble, and Pierre Audi; danc- Twilight of the Gods (ENO). For Gloriana a Film, ers and choreographers such as Kazuo Ohno, she received an International Emmy, a FIPA d’Or, Min Tanaka, and Kim Brandstrup; visual artists and the Royal Philharmonic Society Award. She Karel Appel, Richard Serra, Georg Baselitz, Ian- won the South Bank Show Award for both Mary nis Kounellis, and Anish Kapoor; and composers Stuart (2005) and Peter Grimes (2006), and including Mauricio Kagel, Heiner Goebbels, and was awarded a CBE in 2012. Misato Mochizuki. With Christian Boltanski he co-created a number of memorable installations, MEL MERCIER (composer) is a composer, per- some of them with composer Franck Krawczyk. former,