A Cultural Foot Soldier Returns

When last we checked in on Stravinsky’s “Histoire du Soldat,” as told by Peter Sellars, it was at the Ojai Festival in 1992. There was a volatile sociocultural buzz in the Angeleno air at the time: The festival unfolded just a few months after the post-Rodney King riots. Sellars seized the opportunity to translate that energy to the otherwise placid, idyllic stage of Ojai’s Libbey Bowl, and into the short music-theater fable of the Soldier, the Devil and the game played between them.

While French conductor Pierre Boulez led a compact ensemble from the Los Angeles Philharmonic through Stravinsky’s famously diverse score to one side of the stage, Sellars filled the rest of it with an African American cast retooling the original text in rap rhetoric, dance choreographed by Donald Byrd, and with a pickup truck on the stage for good measure. Not everyone was amused or enlightened--least of all a chorus of sneering mainstream critics--by this radical revision of Stravinsky’s small but visionary 1918 work. But others were suitably dazzled by the sheer audacity, the sensory verve and the timing of the thing.

This week at the Music Center, Sellars returns to “Histoire du Soldat,” again with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, this time led by Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Times have changed, and so has the context. For one thing, the name has been translated to a user-friendly “The Story of a Soldier.” And Sellars has drawn on Mexican and Chicano street theater to energize and localize the piece, an idea that grew out of working on a new version of the Jean Genet epic “The Screens,” staged a year ago at the East L.A. Skills Center in Lincoln Heights. Sellars asked poet Gloria Alvarez, who was involved with the Genet adaptation, to concoct a new bilingual text for the Stravinsky. Supertitles will be in both English and Spanish, to make the text clear in both tongues. In conceiving the new “Soldier,” Sellars also extended the Genet connection and cast the Soldier, Alex Miramontes, and the Devil, Omar Gomez, from among the “Screens” players. Chicano artist Gronk, another “Screens” veteran, provides the sets, and choreographer Donald Byrd is a holdover from the Ojai edition.

The Ojai production, says Sellars, back in L.A. after nearly a year on the road with his Chinese opera epic “The Peony Pavilion,” “was a very logical response to what was going on--the city was so militarized at that time.” The same currency, and a topical setting, marks the new production: “You will smell that it is directly from the streets of this city,” Sellars says.

The nuevo “Soldier” will coalesce in just weeks, in an improvisatory, on-the-fly manner that, like his insistence on local color, is particularly fitting for Stravinsky’s work. Written with Swiss novelist C.F. Ramuz under duress during World War I, “Story of a Soldier” comes with clear instructions from the composer: “I . . . encourage producers to localize the play.”

Sellars clearly has taken that blessing to heart, and then some. His current libretto places the action in the present, in Los Angeles and Mexico, and word has it that current events in Iraq will make it into the fabric of the new text.

“Almost unlike any other Stravinsky piece,” says Sellars, “it was written under the pressure of a specific political situation, which is: ‘Here we are in war conditions in this little town. As artists, we should just get mobilized. Let’s put together a show. We have a wagon and a little band.’

“It’s Igor--not creating this gigantic ballet for the Champs-Elysee Theater--but the opposite. It’s Igor saying, ‘My God, we’re in the middle of a war. We have no budget. Circumstances are serious and, as artists, we have to make a contribution.’ ”

His version, Sellars insists, “is the same deal. You get the feeling of: ‘We can make a contribution. Let’s get out there.’ It’s direct action, as they say. We have a--what do you call it?--a quick-response unit,” he says and laughs.

*

In fact, some members of Sellars’ quick-response unit have been thinking about this project for about a year.

Gronk, born Glugio Gronk Nicandro and raised in East Los Angeles, first worked with Sellars on last year’s Genet production. And the Stravinsky project isn’t Gronk’s only foray into musical collaboration. Two years ago, he was involved in the premiere of “Tormenta Cantata,” in which the Kronos Quartet played composer Joseph Julian Gonzalez’s score, joined by a soprano who faces away from the audience, just as the female figure Tormenta in Gronk’s paintings faces away from the viewer.

The musicians were guided by the ad hoc “baton” of a specially amplified brush that Gronk used to paint a canvas, onstage and in tempo.

Like Sellars, Gronk is inspired by the act of collaboration. In theater, he says, “it’s many minds working to create something. I get jazzed when I’m working with a creative team.” For “Soldier,” Gronk was fortified by research into Stravinsky’s music and other works, as well as the dramatic conversations going on between Sellars and Alvarez. He began to conceive of a series of 12-by-12-foot panels to convey different scenes and to fit the requirement of mobility.

“Once I start putting all of those things together, then I get a sense of where I can go with the piece,” he explains the day before he’s scheduled to actually begin flinging paint around.

“Peter gives me an awful lot of leeway to come up with whatever I want to. He’ll say, ‘Palace.’ I say, ‘Oh, ok, where is it located?’ ‘Mexico.’ [He laughs.] ‘L.A. River.’ ‘Oh, great. I’ve always wanted to do something about that.’ ”

One element that Sellars didn’t find inspiring was the original text. “The text has just always been a little difficult to take,” Sellars says, referring to the simplistic flavor of the good-versus-evil parable. With the new text, he feels, “the sour morality of the original is gone. It’s pretty clear that Stravinsky, after 1920, only played the suite based on the music, and truly distanced himself from the text. I think what’s marvelous is to have a real poet look at it.”

Alvarez’s revision of the text, Sellars feels, offers “that wonderful combination of tremendous fidelity, where it matters, and also an attitude of, where it doesn’t matter, let’s improve it--not only where it doesn’t matter, but where you’re embarrassed about the original.

“There is this marvelous tradition in the Mexican and Chicano theater of going beyond the officially announced morality--the lesson for the day--to a reality in your life that is a lot more complicated and interesting. These little moralities turn out to have a lot more going on than the official cliched homilies.”

The final major component in Sellars’ collaborative vision for “Story of a Soldier” is the L.A. Philharmonic and Salonen, with whom he’s worked on a number of other projects. He feels that Salonen is a kindred spirit, forging new directions in the city’s cultural life.

“Esa-Pekka is determined to remake what a symphony orchestra is in this country. Truly, a program like this is amazing,” he said, referring to the combination of “Soldier” with the world premiere of Roberto Sierra’s “Con madera, metal y cuero” on the Philharmonic schedule this week. “I don’t think you can point to any other orchestra in the country that has a program [like that]: the first half of which is the premiere of a percussion concerto, and then a newly staged version of a dynamic--and still strange and magical--piece. It’s a contribution to a moment in the life of the city.”

*

Sellars has his head full of Stravinsky this year, beyond the new “Story of a Soldier.” Besides having developed stagings of “The Rake’s Progress,” “Oedipus Rex” and “Symphony of Psalms,” he is involved in an ambitious venture for the Holland Festival this year, presenting what he calls “my pet project, which is the last 10 years of Stravinsky’s music, the unloved Stravinsky that Pierre Boulez won’t touch.”

It’s music for the fin de siecle, he asserts. “From the Los Angeles point of view, Stravinsky and Schoenberg are the two main composers.” Both Modernists emigrated to L.A. in the ‘30s, though Stravinsky ultimately left for New York. “What’s interesting is that Stravinsky chose the route of popular culture, and Schoenberg chose the route of highbrow culture.

“You see it in ‘The Story of a Soldier,’ and you see it in ‘Rake’s Progress,’ all the way through. There is the incredible energy of popular culture that he never abandoned. He always wanted to connect with an audience. The idea that [a piece] can be intellectually complex and, at the same time, can play on the street is really impressive. Nobody is talking down to anyone, and it’s just as complicated and exciting as can be. That’s a really positive image for me.”

That ideal of bringing high culture down to earth, without sacrificing integrity, may supply the new “Soldier” with an ultimate mandate: If all goes as planned, the production that comes from the streets will return there, literally. Two flatbed trucks will transport it from the Music Center stage to sites around the city this summer, as a traveling music-theater piece.

“The idea,” Sellars says, “is that, ultimately, it will hit the streets, and to do something that gets the Los Angeles Philharmonic out on the streets, but also gets some street energy into the Los Angeles Philharmonic.” *

*

“THE STORY OF A SOLDIER,” Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. Dates: Thursday and Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 p.m.; next Sunday, 2:30 p.m. Prices: $8-$30. Phone: (323) 850-2000.