’62 Center for Theatre and Dance
Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs
[WILLIAMSTOWN, MA, February 19, 2016] – The ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance’s CenterSeries is proud to present a new opera about the infamous New York City urban planner Robert Moses and the journalist Jane Jacobs. This is a story about New York City, and about cities, in general. It’s a story about the people who live in those cities and how the decisions made on their behalf, by those with authority and those who resist that authority, tangibly impact their lives. It’s a story about two brilliant, visionary urban theorists, each of whom turned their theory into practice, and in so doing changed the landscape of New York and the field of urbanism forever. And it’s a story that continues to this day, in New York City and beyond. There will be one performance only, on Saturday, March 12th, 2016 at 8:00 PM on the ’62 Center’s MainStage, located at 1000 Main Street, in Williamstown, MA. Tickets are $10/$3 students.
Music by Judd Greenstein '01
Libretto by Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Tracy K. Smith
Choreography by Will Rawls '00
Direction and Animation by Joshua Frankel '02
This story is told through the lens of the struggle between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses over the fate of Washington Square Park and lower Manhattan in the 1960s. When Jacobs’s neighborhood was threatened by Moses’s highway development plans, she mounted community opposition that successfully halted Moses’s actions and weakened his hold on urban policy. That moment of conflict represents the juncture between two approaches to urban planning, personified by the two antagonists, that continue to frame the contemporary development of cities around the world.
Robert Moses was the most powerful urban planner of the modern era, an unelected official who carved out an untouchable, autocratic fiefdom that he maintained for four decades, financed through tolls collected on roads and bridges he constructed and ruled from an island fortress in the heart of New York. In the interest of creating his vision of utopia, and with the rare means to carry out such a vision, Moses thoroughly transformed the landscape of New York, dismissing local opposition and destroying neighborhoods in order to build the highways, bridges, and tunnels that opened New York to the automobile age, as well as a vast system of parks, beaches, pools and public housing on a scale unprecedented in modern history.
Jane Jacobs was a journalist and one of history’s great autodidacts, upending the field of urban planning and the sociology of cities through writings that were wholly the product of her own studies and experience. From her keen observations of the city she inhabited, she formed a revolutionary understanding of how cities function, and proposed a new approach to urban planning that used this understanding to promote the kinds of behaviors that make cities prosper and thrive. She was dismissive of paternalistic approaches to planning, based on faulty, fanciful assumptions about the needs of urban populations, which she identified as doing more harm than good.
Judd Greenstein is a composer of structurally complex, viscerally engaging works for varied instrumentation. His
work has been heard at venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, and Amsterdam’s Musiekgebouw; recent commissions include those from the Minnesota Orchestra, the Alabama Symphony, and Roomful of Teeth.
Tracy K. Smith is the author of the memoir Ordinary Light, as well as three books of poetry: Life on Mars, which received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize; Duende, recipient of the 2006 James Laughlin Award, and The Body’s Question, which won the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is a professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University.
Will Rawls is contemporary choreographer, performance artist, curator and writer based in New York City and with continuing projects in Europe. He was named the 2013 MacDowell Colony Fellow, and most recently a recipient of a Foundation of Contemporary Art award.
Joshua Frankel is a director, animator and visual artist whose work responds to the urban environment with a boyish sense of wonder, an idiosyncratic eye for detail, and a conceptual
and aesthetic interest in the act of collage. His work has been presented recently at institutions including bam, the London Institute of Contemporary Art, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Museum of Public Art in Sweden, the New Museum’s ideas city Festival, and the recent UN World Urban Forum.
Produced by 3-Legged Dog, co-produced by New Amsterdam with assistance from Sundance Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Continuing its mission to contextualize arts within scholarly inquiry, the Center presents an impressive body of work that sets student work side-by-side with that of professional artists. We strive to challenge traditional forms, engage with a larger political dialogue and allow our audiences to explore diverse modes of expression. Not content merely to present popular work, the Center’s professional performances, workshops and student productions are designed to invite the entire community to engage, debate, and celebrate the experience of both witnessing and creating live art.
For tickets, visit the Williams ’62 Center Box Office Tues-Sat, 1-5 pm or call (413) 597-2425. For more information, please visit http://62center.williams.edu
