Events
The Season at Villa La Pietra – 2009
The Season at Villa La Pietra, is a summer celebration of creative collaboration conducted throughout the grounds of a 15th century Villa and its extraordinary and scenographic gardens. New York University convenes artists, writers, musicians, and public intellectuals, and provides them the time and space in which to hone their craft, collaborate across disciplines and produce new works or reinterpretations of classics. The resulting work is presented in a debut performance before an audience of Florentines and Americans, invited to the gardens of Villa La Pietra for a surprising and elegant evening.
Dates and Events
- The Comedy of Errors
By A Performance International
Date: May 26th
Location: Limonaia, Garden of Villa La Pietra
Time: 6:30 PM - National Treasure
Screening of the movie by screenwriter, director and producer Jim Kouf
Date: June 11th
Location: Limonaia, Garden of Villa La Pietra
Time: 8:30 PM - Journalism in Jeopardy
E. L. Doctorow talks with award winning author and former editor of The Nation, Victor Navasky, about the future of journalism.
Date: June 15th
Location: Salone, Villa La Pietra
Time: 6:00 PM - The Fiction of Nonfiction - A Conversation along the Borderlands
Rachel Cohen, Walter Murch, Victor Navasky, and Lawrence Weschler
Date: June 17th
Location: Sala da Ballo, Villa La Pietra
Time: 6:00 PM - Big Band Jazz Concert
with Dave Schroeder, Wayne Kranz and Richard Shemaria
Date: June 18th
Location: Seconda Vasca, Garden of Villa La Pietra
Time: 7:00 PM - The Music of the Spheres - How Contemporary Data is Redeeming a Long-Reviled Antique Theory Regarding the Alignment of Planets and Moons
A lecture by Walter Murch, discussion with Natacha Fabbri, James Bradburne and Lawrence Weschler
Date: June 19th
Location: Sala Altana, Palazzo Strozzi in downtown Florence
Time: 6:00 PM
For more information call the Fondazione Strozzi: 055/277.6461 - Big Band Jazz Concert
Date: June 19th
Location: Piazza Sant'Ambrogio in downtown Florence
Time: 9:30 PM - The Unacknowledged Legislators of the World - A Poetical Assembly
Rachel Cohen, Yusef Komunyakaa, Stanley Moss, Walter Murch, Eugene Ostashevsky, Peter Vermeersch and Robert Pinsky
Date: June 20th
Location: Pomario, Garden of Villa La Pietra
Time: 4:00 PM - A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Continuum Company from the Tisch School of The Arts
Date: June 20th
Location: Teatrino, Garden of Villa La Pietra
Time: 7:00 PM
- Poetry and Jazz Music
with Robert Pinsky
Date: June 22nd
Location: Terrazza, Garden of Villa La Pietra
Time: 9:00 PM - A Midsummer Night's Dream
The Continuum Company from the Tisch School of The Arts
Date: June 23rd
Location: Cloister. Santo Spirits in downtown Florence
Time: TBC - Readings by the students of E.L. Doctorow and Robert Pinsky followed by a Jazz Concert and ending with the Florence Fireworks
Date: June 24th
Location Readings: Salone, Villa La Pietra
Location Jazz: Prato Tondo, Garden of Villa La Pietra
Time: 6:00 PM - Fiesole Film Festival
Conference with the recipient of the Fiesole Film Festival Award Bertrand Tavernier
Date: July 8th
Location: Limonaia, Garden of Villa La Pietra
Time: 10:00 AM
R.S.V.P. to lapietra.reply@nyu.edu or +39 055 5007.210
The Season 2009 will present A Midsummer Nights Dream. A company of five actors will take on the creation of a site-specific production presented throughout the eight acres of Villa La Pietra’s Renaissance revival gardens.
Two world-renowned writers will be in residence, and working with students: E.L. Doctorow and poet Robert Pinsky. Recording jazz artists will return to the estate with advanced students to rehearse and perform in concert in the Seconda Vasca of the gardens at Villa La Pietra. Poet Robert Pinsky will work with the jazz musicians to develop a work to be presented first in The Season performance. Jazz musicians will also perform in Midsummer, joining the community of artists sharing works, and producing new and exciting works from their collaboration. And, we are confident, work which we cannot yet imagine will emerge from this group of talent, work which will seek out a stage in the gardens of Villa La Pietra or within the narrow streets and majestic palazzi of the Florence city center and attract an audience unaware of what they will encounter.
Villa La Pietra provides a supportive environment for artists to create work, a place where actors and writers can collaborate in a way they could never do in the dispersed world of the arts. These artists meet, work together for a short, intense time and produce a fully professional, innovative performance.
The audience is an important partner in the success of The Season and is invited to enjoy probing and pioneering work and to dialogue with the artists. Each performance is followed by a reception during which audience members enjoy refreshments with the artists. This combination of high production quality, innovation in programming and the intimacy of The Season community has made The Season at La Pietra an essential part of the Florentine summer.
This confluence of talent, audience, creative vibrancy and an artistic home are unique. In three short years of production, Villa La Pietra has become, through The Season, a center of excellence in the arts. The new work that has emerged from this laboratory has found a second life in prestigious New York theaters.