NEA Award
Preliminary set model for the little match girl passion.
January 24, 2014
Dear Friend of FST,
I have some great news to share with you.
The Art Works program of the National Endowment for the Arts has awarded Figures of Speech a major grant to support the creation of a new performance.
How big a deal is this? Of the 160 grants awarded nationwide in the theater discipline, only 2 were made to theaters in Maine.
The performance will be a visual tapestry of puppets, objects and film projections surrounding the four singers called for in David Lang’s extraordinarily beautiful composition, the little match girl passion.
Lang won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2008 for the score, which refigures the Hans Christian Andersen story about the suffering and death of a young match seller as a Passion, drawing from the Andersen text and from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Of the piece, Pulitzer-juror and Washington Post columnist Tim Page said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been so moved by a new, and largely unheralded, composition as I was by David Lang’s the little match girl passion, which is unlike any music I know.”
I was deeply moved by the music when I first heard it two years ago, and the piece seemed to me a perfect vehicle for Figures of Speech’s visionary weave of puppet and actor theater. Lang agreed when he granted permission to work with his music, saying, “I know how much puppets can do in telling a story like this one.”
I will be leading a team of five artists in the creation phase of the project, which will focus on the integration of actors and puppets with projected film details and animated scenery, timed to the music. Once we have the stage work figured out, we will add four live singers to the production, and begin touring the work nationally, and perhaps internationally.
The NEA’s $10,000 grant must be matched 1:1, and I hope you will join us in this exciting venture by contributing as generously as you can.
Wishing you the very best in the coming year!
John Farrell
Artistic Director