Satyagraha draws sell-out crowd

NEW YORK:  A sell-out crowd will witness Philip Glass’s seminal work Satyagraha which is re-imagined in a powerful new staging on Friday at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. 

The opera sung in Sanskrit with tenor Richard Croft as Gandhi and Dante Anzolini in his Met debut as conductor is selling tickets costing up to $320 with remarkable ease. 

“The opening night premiere is sold-out,” Sommer Hixon, the press director of the Metropolitan Opera, told DNA. The Met will provide subtitles in English to help the audience follow the opera with its mingling musical, theatrical and spiritual aims to convey the timelessness of Gandhi’s message.

For the opera’s Met premiere, director Phelim McDermott and designer Julian Crouch have created stunning sets, larger-than-life newspaper puppets, videos and installation art to depict Gandhi’s formative years in South Africa when he first mobilised the minority Indian community and developed what later grew into the sweeping nonviolent civil disobedience movement.

Created in collaboration with Improbable, McDermott and Crouch’s British-based theatre company, startling newspaper puppets are a key set element in the new production of Satyagraha. 

“The way we improvise with materials such as newspaper and sticky tape seems to mirror Glass’s kaleidoscopic score,” McDermott says.  “There’s an opportunity in Satyagraha’s non-narrative structure to exploit that aspect. We’ll be using corrugated iron — a material used in the colonial structures often seen in the background of photograph’s of Gandhi’s campaign — and newspaper, reflecting both our own frequent use of it and Indian Opinion, the publication that promoted his message.”

The creative team acknowledges that Gandhi was one of the first people to channel the power of the media. So the newspaper seen in this production ranges from broadsheets to projected text and giant puppets.

According to the playbill the three hour and 30 minute long opera, which unfolds in seven pivotal scenes, is “anything but a straightforward recounting of historic events.” It says that unlike a traditional narrative, the story unfolds seemingly out of time, with a structural framework in which past, present, and future converge. Glass’s has earlier said that his intention was not to create a faithful likeness of Gandhi but rather “an artist’s vision of him.”