Bard SummerScape returns this year with eight weeks of live music, opera, dance, and theater. Highlights include the 32nd Bard Music Festival “Rachmaninoff and His World;” a new production of Strauss’s The Silent Woman, directed by Christian Räth; a World Premiere commission from Pam Tanowitz and David Lang; a new adaptation of Molière’s Dom Juan, directed by Ashley Tata; and more. Gideon Lester is Artistic Director of the Fisher Center at Bard and Senior Curator at the Open Society University Network’s Center for the Arts and Human Rights. A festival director, creative producer, and dramaturg, he has collaborated with and commissioned a broad range of American and international artists across disciplines.
The Fisher Center at Bard will present a bold, gender-reframed, era-transcending vision of Molière’s 1665 tragicomedy Dom Juan, conceived and directed by Ashley Tata, with a new translation from NYU Professor of French Literature and theater scholar Sylvaine Guyot and Fisher Center Artistic Director Gideon Lester.
Molière’s Dom Juan A glittering and ferocious study of lust and power, Molière’s portrait of the libertine Dom Juan combines slapstick comedy with the taut psychology of a thriller. In this bold new adaptation, director Ashley Tata (whose digital production of Mad Forest astonished Fisher Center audiences in 2020) sets the story in a fantasy world where 17th-century France meets late-1970s America, raising pertinent questions about class, faith and gender. Casting both the titular libertine and his sidekick as women, Tata’s production literally recasts this subversive and brilliant tragicomedy in a contemporary light—celebrating Molière’s 400th anniversary with a Dom Juan for the 21st.