READY FOR PREMIERE
How Gulliver Returned Home in a Manner that was Very Not Direct
Music by Victoria Bond
Libretto by Stephen Greco
Design and Direction by Doug Fitch
based on the novel “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift
How Gulliver Returned Home in a Manner that was Very Not Direct
How Gulliver Returned Home in a Manner that was Very Not Direct is a “puppet operetta” based on Jonathan Swift’s famous work of fantastical satire, Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Aimed at family audiences, where everyone can delight in the story’s visual magic and the fun it pokes at colonial British nationalism, the 70-minute operetta is comprised of four “travelog” acts surrounded by short domestic scenes set in the Gulliver family home in England. The work employs a small orchestra with eleven singers and four puppeteers, and can be presented in a traditional proscenium theater.
How Gulliver Returned Home… has been in development since 2015 and was commissioned in 2016 and by American Opera Project (AOP). In 2016 the work was supported by a commissioning grant from the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, through Opera America's Opera Grants for Female Composers program. Public showings of excerpts of the work took place in 2017 (through AOP) and 2019 (through Cutting Edge Concerts). The work had been scheduled for a 2022 premiere by the Salzburg Marionette Theater, where Fitch and Greco had previously created a work, but COVID derailed that plan. Now with a 2022 grant from the Jim Henson Foundation the work is on track for a first complete showing in 2023, at the University Maryland, with the National Orchestral Institute.
The creators’ vision was of a multi-genre theater work combining Swift’s classic cultural critique with theatrical magic that delivers surprising innovations in puppetry and staging. A chamber-sized symphonic ensemble performs alongside, adding narrative Foley elements, storms, and transitional interludes.
Swift’s classic satire-cum-travelogue is particularly timely today in our current society where a considerate curiosity about other people from different cultures, as embodied by Gulliver, is more important than ever. Thus it seemed important to the creators to target this work toward whole families, who might be stimulated to engage in post-performance discussions about difference—different-sized people, different cultures, etc. The puppet-operetta approach to the story asks the performers to play many characters– sometimes multitudes!—and put both their virtuosity and their humanity front-and-center in the spectacle. The work sticks respectfully to Swift’s novel and the enduringly valid cultural critique it embodies. Yet the creators’ envision Gulliver not just as a physical traveler but a conceptual explorer, investigating the idea of rejecting his restrictive home culture and possibly becoming a citizen of the broader world.
CREATORS
Victoria Bond - Composer
A major force in 21st century music, composer Victoria Bond is known for her melodic gift and dramatic flair. Her works for orchestra, chamber ensemble and opera have been lauded by the New York Times as "powerful, stylistically varied and technically demanding."
In addition to Soul of a Nation, the four presidential portraits on the Albany label, highlights of Ms. Bond’s catalogue include the operas Mrs. President, Clara and The Miracle of Light; ballets Equinox and Other Selves; orchestral works Thinking like a Mountain, Bridges and Urban Bird; and chamber works Dreams of Flying, Frescoes and Ash and Instruments of Revelation, among many others. Her compositions have been performed by the New York City Opera, Shanghai, Dallas and Houston Symphonies, members of the Chicago Symphony and New York Philharmonic, American Ballet Theater and the Cassatt and Audubon Quartets.
The New York Times praised Victoria Bond’s conducting as “full of energy and fervor.” She has served as principal guest conductor of Chamber Opera Chicago since 2005. Prior positions include Assistant Conductor of Pittsburgh Symphony and New York City Opera and Music Director of the Roanoke Symphony and Opera, Bel Canto Opera and Harrisburg Opera. Ms. Bond has guest conducted throughout the United States, Europe, South America and Asia. She is the first woman awarded a doctorate in orchestral conducting from the Juilliard School.
Ms. Bond is Artistic Director of Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival in New York, which she founded in 1998, and is a frequent lecturer at the Metropolitan Opera and has lectured for the New York Philharmonic. The Wall Street Journal, NBC’s Today Show, the New York Times and other national publications have profiled Ms. Bond.
Stephen Greco’s (librettist) writing for the stage and musical theater include W Hot Culture (Giants Are Small, 2013-’14); How Did We…? (with Doug Fitch, 2014); Dadabomb (Giants Are Small, 2014); Peter and the Wolf in Hollywood (Giants Are Small, 2017); and the opera The Adventures of Gulliver (with composer Victoria Bond, 2019). He has written the libretto for an untitled opera project now in development with composer Scott Wheeler and director Doug Fitch.
Greco is also Editorial Director of InsideRisk, for whom he wrote the live, interactive multimedia experience Shadows of Medellin (2017). With a background in cultural journalism, Greco has occupied top editorial positions at Interview magazine, Trace magazine, Platform.net, and ClassicalTV.com, the latter which streamed full-length cultural content including, opera, ballet, classical music and theater. Greco has contributed features on the arts and entertainment to publications such as American Way, Art News, The Observer, MTV Online, New York magazine, The New Yorker, the New York Times online, Opera News, Playbill, and Stagebill.
Doug Fitch - Design, Direction
Visual artist, designer, and director Doug Fitch recent AOP projects include the World Premiere of Daniel Thomas Davis’s opera Six. Twenty. Outrageous at Symphony Space. He created several productions with the New York Philharmonic, including Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre; Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen; A Dancer’s Dream: Two Works by Stravinsky; and HK Gruber’s Gloria – A Pig Tale. The Philharmonic later performed Petrushka, one-half of A Dancer’s Dream, on tour at London’s Barbican Centre. Next year Le Grand Macabre will be remounted at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany. Mr. Fitch has also created productions for Los Angeles Opera, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Santa Fe Opera, and Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, and for Bard’s SummerScape Festival. His Tanglewood production of Elliott Carter’s What Next? was filmed and later screened at the Museum of Modern Art.
Doug Fitch directed and designed the original version of Matthew Aucoin’s Orphic Moments at National Sawdust, a production that was remounted at the Salzburg Landestheater. He designed a third version for Master Voices at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater. At National Sawdust he performed a live-animated version of Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition with Alessio Bax, later remounted with Inon Barnatan at Town Hall. His cabaret, Doug Fitch’s Art Gallery Variety Show, has appeared at National Sawdust and Maison Francaise at Columbia University.
Mr. Fitch is a co-founder of Giants Are Small, which, in co-production with Universal Music and Deutsche Grammophon, developed Peter and the Wolf in Hollywood — an iPad app, CD, and digital album featuring Alice Cooper as narrator and the German National Youth Orchestra. In May 2017 a live version was performed by the National Symphony Orchestra with Mr. Fitch as narrator.
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“THE ADVENTURES OF GULLIVER”
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Information
Duration 70' (estimated) / no intermission
Commission Commissioned by American Opera Projects through the Opera Grants for Female Composers program, made possible through the generosity of The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. Development by Gulf Coast Symphony and AOP, with additional support provided by Weltone New Music, Inc..
Premiere TBA; Doug Fitch, designer / director.
Roles 12 singers (SATB), Young Gulliver (tenor); Old Gulliver (baritone); 10 (various roles)
Instrumentation Orchestra: (2222/4331/2 perc./strings) / Chamber version: (cl, vn, vc, pf, perc.)
Publisher Staged performances of this work require licensing through the composer.