Since 1919, The New School has been home to scholars, creators, and activists who challenge convention and boldly make their mark on the world. To celebrate this groundbreaking legacy, we are opening our doors to the public for a weeklong festival of innovative performances, talks, workshops, screenings, exhibitions, and more.
On October 1–6, 2019, join us as we reflect on a century of world-changing ideas and together imagine a new kind of future.
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"The Art of Change: An Ongoing Libretto-Writing Project" by Chiara Bottici
In this post, Chiara Bottici discusses a group project involving the writing of a libretto for Jean-Baptiste Barrière’s opera The Art of Change, for which she is serving as editor. The opera, which will premiere January 16, 2020, at The New School, explores the question of what needs to be changed today through a variety of media, including dramatic stagings of historical and original texts, performance of instrumental and electronic music, and improvisation on computer-generated and -processed music transcribed in real time.
The libretto will include quotations from texts on the philosophy of change and the possibility of applying them in the current situation. The first edition of the libretto will be posted on Public Seminar, the online platform of The New School for Social Research, on September 15. Through Public Seminar, the libretto will be circulated in and outside of The New School with an invitation to the public to contribute comments and revisions, to be regularly integrated into the libretto in a collective process. The project will contribute to public discourse on the urgent question of change, in accordance with the animating spirit of The Art of Change and of Public Seminar, the legacy of The New School's legendary General Seminar.
Public Seminar is an innovative online platform drawing on great university ideals and working to strengthen and extend these ideals, not to replace them. Based on the founding traditions of academic freedom, critical scholarship, and public engagement of the original The New School for Social Research (1919) and its University in Exile (1933), this course seeks to inform debate about the pressing issues of current times and create a global intellectual commons. An independent project of The New School Publishing Initiative, Public Seminar is produced by The New School faculty, students, and staff, and supported by colleagues and collaborators around the globe.
In this series of pubic editorial discussions, participants review, over lunch, three essays on pressing issues of our times with authors, and then think together with them how society should explore those issues in future essays in order to properly inform public debate.
