Satyagraha by Philip Glass and Constance DeJong was staged in April 2007 as a co-production between the English National Opera, The Metropolitan Opera New York and Improbable.
Using multiple projectors to cover the entire performance area, Fifty Nine Productions created a range of visual material which appeared throughout the show. Large scale textual projections replaced surtitles, and an aesthetic based on Gandhi’s newspaper, The Indian Opinion informed the overall video design.
Satyagraha was at the Coliseum, St Martin’s Lane, London (English National Opera) until May 2007. It re-opened at the Metropolitan Opera, New York in April 2008. It went on make a much-anticipated return to the London Coliseum in February 2010 and onto the Met Opera, New York, from November 2011 which would be broadcast live in HD to cinemas around the world. In February 2018, Satyagraha returned for a critically acclaimed run to the ENO in London.
In October, 2018, the production opened at LA Opera:
A must-see magnificent production…. L.A. Opera has imported a production created at English National Opera by the quirky British team of director Phelim McDermott and designer Julian Crouch, who have a love for puppetry, idiosyncratic mechanical devices, video and improbable materials turned into living sculpture. The Metropolitan Opera brought the production to New York a few years ago, and it was one of the finest things the company had done in modern times. At L.A. Opera, it is better still and a landmark for the company… The video projections of title and graphic designs by 59 Productions work perfectly.
An extraordinary success… A succession of quotations or even single words appear across the cyclorama or on newspapers held aloft by groups of westerners who read only what they are required to read….The visual ingenuity of McDermott and Crouch’s staging is a constant source of intrigue and illumination.
[Satyagraha] is an astonishingly beautiful work…it is impossible to imagine a better execution…The whole thing serves as a monumental affirmation of human dignity at a time when many have begun to question its very existence – and for that we must be infinitely grateful.
A masterwork of theatrical intensity and integrity… The beauty of the sung Sanskrit is bewitching: sober sepia projections of key passages replace supertitles…The perfect marriage of music and subject matter
The production is a work of genius that ranges from the very simple to the fantastically ambitious … A sense of playful fantasy somehow suits the meditative mood of the music and the serious needs of the religious and political subject matter. <br><br> “Satyagraha” is not among this season’s high-definition broadcasts of Met productions at movie theaters. Someone who knows the ways of the company told me that adding it to the schedule could cost a million dollars. <br><br> They should find a million dollars.
The Improbable theater company’s production of Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday night, represents the kind of work the Met should be doing. It is an important revival of a major recent piece. It is a significant work of theater. And it provides an all too rare demonstration of the fact that new opera can indeed be a contemporary art….a profound and beautiful work of theater. The final act is a masterpiece of the power of simplicity.
For this new production, introduced last year at the English National Opera, director Phelim McDermott and designer Julian Crouch fashioned scenes as enigmatic and transcendent as Glass’s music. Portions of Constance DeJong’s libretto, adapted from the Bhagavad Gita, are projected onto a curved wall of corrugated iron that frames the action. Ordinary materials such as newspaper and packing tape are transformed into props, scenery and animated creatures, gracefully manipulated by stilt-walkers and aerialists…the most achingly beautiful presentation the Met has introduced since Anthony Minghella’s Madama Butterfly in 2006.
Directors Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch work with big simple gestures, letting their imagery morph organically: the fit with Glass’s music, which consists of slowly metamorphosing textures, is so perfect that the evening’s events seem governed by the regular pulse of the heart….Not much ‘happens’, but it’s all played out with such sacramental seriousness, and on a kaleidoscopically-changing backdrop, that we are held riveted. The ceremonial stripping of the leader down to his famous semi-nudity, the movement’s ritual baptism of fire, and the march against the first official colour bar are each inventively realised; the final scene, in which Gandhi becomes John the Baptist to King’s apotheosis on a plinth, is spellbindingly beautiful. However one rates the music per se, this show as a whole is a masterpiece. Book now.
…It’s this hypnotic flavour to Glass’s sound-world that is so stunningly conveyed in this production, a collaboration with the theatre group Improbable. Mounted by Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, the staging creates a theatre of poverty to match Gandhi’s own philosophy of “Satyagraha”, or “truth-force”: the belief that fighting against oppression need not be done with violence….It’s disturbing, inspiring, uplifting. So what more do you want from your opera?
Three years ago, ENO’s staging of Philip Glass’s second opera, Satyagraha, devised by Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch of the theatre company Improbable, seemed a marvel, transfixing musically and visually. The production has since been to New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and its return to the ENO reaffirms its dramatic potency, with giant papier-mache puppets, video projections and eloquently choreographed movement… Admiration is redoubled most of all, though, for McDermott and Crouch, who trust the music to work its hypnotic spell, and balance its moments of stasis against the freewheeling, dramatically appropriate imagery. It’s a must-see for anyone who missed the first run, and a landmark in recent London opera.
The Improbable theater company’s production of Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday night, represents the kind of work the Met should be doing. It is an important revival of a major recent piece. It is a significant work of theater. And it provides an all too rare demonstration of the fact that new opera can indeed be a contemporary art….a profound and beautiful work of theater. The final act is a masterpiece of the power of simplicity.
For this new production, introduced last year at the English National Opera, director Phelim McDermott and designer Julian Crouch fashioned scenes as enigmatic and transcendent as Glass’s music. Portions of Constance DeJong’s libretto, adapted from the Bhagavad Gita, are projected onto a curved wall of corrugated iron that frames the action. Ordinary materials such as newspaper and packing tape are transformed into props, scenery and animated creatures, gracefully manipulated by stilt-walkers and aerialists…the most achingly beautiful presentation the Met has introduced since Anthony Minghella’s Madama Butterfly in 2006.
Hypnotic visual and musical magic.
A transcendent evening of theater and one of the most striking new Met productions of recent years….The production is a constantly unfolding phantasmagoria of surprises
Surely the most distinctive and brilliant achievement on the London operatic scene in more than a decade… It’s hard to imagine Satyagraha ever being better done, yet difficult to believe that ENO will revive the show again. Do anything – anything non-violent, of course – to see it now.
An inspired marriage of sight and sound… <br><br> Given that the history is jumbled and the libretto is in Sanskrit, the singers have to make a similar sort of surrender, and since there are no English surtitles, so does the audience. <br><br> But no production ever made surrender so easy. Events unfold with dreamlike poise – the stage in a constant state of self-transformation – and one watches entranced as Improbable’s brilliant ‘skills ensemble’ create cows, crocodiles, jousting giants and Hindu gods with somnambulistic purpose and precision. Yet it’s all done with pea-sticks, papier-mache, Scotch tape, and painterly lighting….Unforgettable
A really striking achievement on many levels, and an unmissable music theatre experience. If anything, its broad philosophical message is even more profound now than before, in the wake of today’s unrighted injustices and often wilfully unlearned lessons of the financial crisis….The wonder is that all this succeeds so brilliantly and involvingly. It does so, above all, because the production by Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch understands and has creative confidence in Glass’s music and aims. The staging is full of visual patterns and flights of fancy of its own, which match and intertwine with those of the music. The attendant presences of Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore and Martin Luther King emphasise the broader connections of the Gandhian story….Seriously engaging.
Director
Phelim McDermott
Designer
Julian Crouch
Conductor
Edward Gardner
Lighting Designer
Paule Constable
Associate Lighting Designer
Kevin Sleep
Costume Designer
Kevin Pollard
Video Design
Leo Warner
Mark Grimmer