The American Academy in Rome’s Janet and Arthur Ross Rome Prize Ceremony to announce the winners of the 2012–13 Fellowships took place on April 26, 2012, at the Harmonie Club in New York. Over 280 guests attended the ceremony, including many Academy Trustees, Fellows, Residents, friends and supporters.
After the Rome Prize winners’ names were announced by William B. Hart, chairman of the Board of Trustees, the audience enjoyed a memorable conversation with the opera, theater, and festival director Peter Sellars and the Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Toni Morrison about Desdemona, a play on which they collaborated that explores in detail the female protagonist of Shakespeare’s Othello.
Morrison framed the evening by commenting, “I would like our conversation to touch on the following: the history and background of our collaboration in developing Desdemona, and my initial conception of the project and the learning process I underwent related to its theatrical and literary requirements. The script demanded language that was fresh, meaningful, and performative. Furthermore it needed to reveal interior lives and characters’ motives unexamined in Othello. Most important, the project had to have clear twenty-first century resonance. Among the latter was the vital presence of Rokia Traoré’s voice and music, which stressed the relationship between Africa and Shakespeare, as well as several current histories of race.”
The idea of Desdemona arose after an argument a decade ago between Sellars and Morrison. Sellars said he would never stage Othello because he thought the story was too thin. Morrison retorted that perhaps the performances were thin, but the story was not. As a result of this ongoing conversation, Sellars went on to stage a Public Theater presentation with Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago and John Ortiz as Othello. Morrison agreed to write the story from Desdemona’s point of view.
The theatrical collaboration of Desdemona incorporated Morrison’s script and Sellars’s direction and featured music composed by Traoré, a singer, songwriter, and guitarist from Mali. The narrative imagines a conversation from beyond the grave between Shakespeare's Desdemona and Barbary, the woman Shakespeare identifies as the African nurse who raised her. After centuries of colonialism and racism, the two women share songs and stories, and hope for a different future. A New York Times review described Desdemona as “an interactive narrative of words, music and song about Shakespeare’s doomed heroine, who speaks to the audience from the grave about the traumas of race, class, gender, war—and the transformative power of love.”
Sellars credited Morrison with creating an extraordinary text “which will never let you read Shakespeare again the same way,” and “revolutionizing Shakespeare by letting the woman speak.” Sellars also drew parallels between their collaborative effort and the work that takes place at the Academy. “The American Academy has always been about these cultural crossroads,” he said.
After their conversation, Morrison and Sellars responded to questions from the audience.
According to AAR president Adele Chatfield-Taylor (1984 Fellow), the discussion struck a universal chord. “Although Morrison and Sellars spoke about their collaboration on something very specific, it was fascinating to everyone present because it was really about the way an artist thinks, and the way history can color the imagination.”
Video from the event can be viewed on YouTube.