On bus stops and phone kiosks throughout Manhattan, huge posters ask: “Could an Opera Triumph Where War Never Has?” It’s a strange enough question to make pedestrians step closer.
Faced with selling a Philip Glass opera on the life of young Mohandas Gandhi – in Sanskrit, no less – the Metropolitan Opera came up with offbeat tactics to promote a piece whose very title is inscrutable to most.
Satyagraha – it means ‘truth force’ – runs through May 1. “People say Satyagraha, and they ask, ‘What is that?’” said Elena Park, the Met’s assistant manager of editorial and creative content who oversees advertising. “You have to explain what the word means, then you have to explain the idea of passive resistance and then you have to explain it’s about Gandhi. It’s such a dense, complex message.”
Park, an avid consumer of Gandhi biographies, believed that posters of the young peacenik with thought-provoking captions would spark public curiosity.
She also turned to the Bhagavad Gita that influenced Mahatma Gandhi and informs Glass’s opera, to better understand both.
Met General Manager Peter Gelb agreed on a series of poster-sized photos of Gandhi bearing peace-themed captions linking his ideas with Glass’s opera. “Could an Opera Make Us Warriors for Peace?” says one. The others read: “Could an Opera Make Us Stand Up for the Truth?” and “Could an Opera Put Virtue Back on Its Feet?” The posters are visible at more than 150 locations around Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Yoga teachers
After that, Park, a yoga-devotee just like the master, reached out to those who already embrace something of Gandhi’s approach to asceticism and spirituality in their own lives. She sent letters earlier this month to several yoga teachers in New York.
“My hope is that the awareness of this opera will encourage another look at Gandhi’s message of peace at a time when there is so much struggle and unrest in the world,” Park wrote.
Greg Gumucio, owner of Yoga to the People, in Manhattan’s East Village, was one of more than 100 instructors invited to attend last Thursday’s dress rehearsal. He said he brought almost two dozen fellow yoga teachers with him who came as welcome gate-crashers.
“It was a brilliant idea,” said Gumucio, 37. “They got at least 22 mouths who are going to spread the word about the opera, and those mouths are going to teach and tell 30 or 40 other yoga students. They reached a much broader audience.”
Gigantic puppets
Gelb said he persuaded Agnes Varis, a managing director on the Met’s board, to donate $1.3 million of the opera’s nearly $1.7 million production cost. She donated another $200,000 for the marketing and ad campaign.
The Met’s version of ‘Satyagraha’ stars tenor Richard Croft as Gandhi and is directed by Phelim McDermott, with sets designed by Julian Crouch. McDermott and Crouch are artistic directors of London's Improbable theater company.
The three and half hour work unfolds in typical Glass style: very slowly and with lots of repetition. At times, it casts a trancelike spell and offers some intriguing visual effects.Gigantic puppets tower over the stage, some of them fashioned from newsprint. Newspapers are a recurrent motif in the Glass opera, reflecting Gandhi’s experience as the editor of his own journal and his use of the media to disseminate his beliefs to a wider public.
