Fisher Center at Bard Announces Civis Hope Commissions
Hope may seem daring in this age of angst and uncertainty, but it is at the heart of three major new works coming to the Fisher Center at Bard, including a musical adaptation of 'Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,' the performing arts center announced on Tuesday.
With a $2.5 million gift from the Civis Foundation, matched by Bard College for an initial endowment of $5 million, the Fisher Center said it would create the Civis Hope Commissions, a program to support 'contemporary artists who will examine, interrogate and transform American artifacts, archival materials or artworks from the past to imagine a more perfect, just and hopeful future.'
Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center's artistic director and chief executive, described the program in an interview as 'a rallying cry for the possibility of art.'
'Art can describe things as they might be,' he said, 'and see things not only as they are framed by the current news cycle. Great art has the ability to shift our consciousness and show us what we might become if we were really inhabiting our best selves. That's what these commissions are really about.'
The Civis Hope Commissions are intended to continue in perpetuity, but the Fisher Center announced three projects to start: 'Jubilee,' a new musical with a libretto by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, based on Scott Joplin's opera 'Treemonisha'; Courtney Bryan's first opera, an adaptation of Tennessee Williams's 'Suddenly Summer'; and the 'Yentl' musical, which will be the celebrated director Barrie Kosky's first project developed in the United States.
These commissions had already been in the works at the Fisher Center, but were chosen for the Civis program because they fit its mandate, Lester said, adding that working under the Civis umbrella allowed him and the artists 'an opportunity to think about them in a new way.'
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