Join theatrical director Peter Sellars and Orville Schell, Director of Asia Society's Center on US-China Relations, as they discuss the past, present and future of US-China relations as well as the role of culture in this constantly evolving relationship.
On February 2, Sellars makes his Metropolitan Opera debut with the groundbreaking work, John Adams's Nixon in China. According to Sellars, this exploration of President Nixon's historic 1972 encounter with Mao and Communist China "shows you what opera can do to history, which is to deepen it and move into its more subtle, nuanced, and mysterious corners."
The Metropolitan Opera's production of Nixon in China will be shown "Live in HD" in movie theaters internationally on Saturday, February 12. The production was originally created by English National Opera. The work was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Houston Grand Opera, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Bio
Orville Schell
Orville Schell was born in New York City in 1940, graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University in Far Eastern History, was an exchange student at National Taiwan University in the 1960s, and did graduate work at the University of California Berkeley, in Chinese History where he earned a Ph.D.
He has worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and traveled widely in China.
He is also a contributor to such magazines as the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Granta, Wired, Newsweek, Mother Jones, the China Quarterly, and the New York Review of Books.
Schell has been the recipient of several writing fellowships from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center. He is also the winner of numerous awards, including the Harvard/Stanford Shorenstein Award for Asian Journalism, Overseas Press Club of America's Award for the Best Article on a Foreign Subject, a Mencken Award for the Best Feature and a Page One Award for the Best Investigative Story.
The author of fourteen books, nine of them about China, and the contributor to numerous edited volumes, his most recent books are Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangrila from the Himalayas to Hollywood, The China Reader: The Reform Years, and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China's Leaders.
He has also served as a television commentator for several network news programs, has worked both as correspondent and consultant for a number of PBS and Frontline documentaries and been the correspondent for an Emmy award-winning program for a "60 minutes" segment.
Schell serves on the boards of Human Rights Watch, the Sundance Documentary Fund jury, and the Social Science Research Council. He is also a member of the Pacific Council, the Council on Foreign Relations and a regular participant in the World Economic Forum at Davos.
Schell is the former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.
He was recently appointed Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York City.
Peter Sellars
Peter Sellars is an American theater director, noted for his contemporary stagings of classical operas and plays.
Sellars is professor of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, where he teaches Art as Social Action and Art as Moral Action.
(born Jan. 9, 1913, Yorba Linda, Calif., U.S.—died April 22, 1994, New York, N.Y.) 37th president of the U.S. (1969–74). He studied law at Duke University and practiced in California (1937–42). After serving in World War II, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (1946). As a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he received national attention for his hostile questioning of Alger Hiss. In 1950 he was elected to the Senate following a bitter campaign in which he unfairly portrayed his opponent as a communist sympathizer; the epithet “Tricky Dick” dates from this period. He won the vice presidency in 1952 as the running mate of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower. During the campaign he delivered a nationally televised address, the “Checkers” speech (named for the dog he admitted receiving as a political gift), to rebut charges of financial misconduct. He and Eisenhower were reelected easily in 1956. As the Republican presidential candidate in 1960, he lost narrowly to John F. Kennedy. After failing to win the 1962 California gubernatorial race, he announced his retirement from politics and criticized the press, declaring that it would not “have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.” He moved to New York to practice law. He reentered politics by running for president in 1968, narrowly defeating Hubert H. Humphrey with his “southern strategy” of seeking votes from southern and western conservatives in both parties. As president, he began to withdraw U.S. military forces from South Vietnam while resuming the bombing of North Vietnam. His expansion of the Vietnam War to Cambodia and Laos in 1970 provoked widespread protests in the U.S. He established direct relations with China and made a state visit there in 1972, the first by a U.S. president. On a visit to the Soviet Union later that year, he signed agreements resulting from the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between the U.S. and the Soviet Union held between 1969 and 1972, known as SALT I. In domestic affairs, Nixon responded to persistent inflation and increasing unemployment by devaluing the dollar and imposing unprecedented peacetime controls on wages and prices. His administration increased funding for many federal civil-rights agencies and proposed legislation that created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In 1972 he won reelection with a landslide victory over George McGovern. Assisted by Henry A. Kissinger, he concluded a peace agreement with North Vietnam (1973), though the war did not come to an end until 1975. His administration helped to undermine the coalition government of Chile's Marxist Pres. Salvador Allende, leading to Allende's overthrow in a military coup in 1973. Nixon's second term was overshadowed by the Watergate scandal, which stemmed from illegal activities by Nixon and others related to the burglary and wiretapping of the headquarters of the Democratic Party. After lengthy congressional investigations and facing near-certain impeachment, Nixon resigned the presidency on Aug. 8, 1974, the first president to do so. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford. In retirement, he wrote his memoirs and several books on foreign policy, which modestly rehabilitated his reputation and earned him a role as an elder statesman and foreign-policy expert.
I was shocked about Maoīs sex life, the impression the world got was a dedicated thinker where his responsibilities were to great for personal enjoyments. I wish there was a way too check on this with this hair do or donīt makes information about sex suspicious, his cartoonish look takes away credibility. Where do I find this perverted info of Mao and wife! I guess someone like Mao killing 60 million people leaves little time for sex, I would think. Privacy is very important and saving face is everything, OPERA ABOUT COMMUNIST CHINA and itīs human rights abuse 200 million child labors is enough to make me ill.White version of Don KING.
member. 
Watch Now
