The Rubin Museum of Art, Upstate Films, and the Fisher Center at Bard Present the New York Premiere of “this body is so impermanent…” (Vimalakirti Sutra, Chapter Two), February 8–12

During 2020 Quarantines and Amid Our Ongoing Global Public Health Crisis, Improvisatory Artists on Three Continents and in Multiple Disciplines Created a Film Responding to the Vimalakirti Sutra and Bridging Art, Spirituality, and Wellness as a Call to Community to Learn and Heal Together
 
Screenings Are Followed by Conversations with Sellars, Collaborators, and Practitioners in the Field of Healing and the Arts

The Rubin Museum of Art, Upstate Films, and the Fisher Center at Bard present the first New York screenings of “this body is so impermanent…” (Vimalakirti Sutra, Chapter Two), a film directed by Peter Sellars and produced by the Fisher Center and The Boethius Initiative at UCLA, with performances from Wang Dongling, Ganavya Doraiswamy, and Michael Schumacher, February 8–12, 2023. The Vimalakirti Sutra, a foundational scripture of Zen Buddhism from the first century CE, understands illness as a path of spiritual awakening. Exploring two pages from this visionary Sutra, five virtuosic and singular artists—master calligrapher Wang Dongling, devotional singer Ganavya Doraiswamy, improvisatory dancer Michael Schumacher, cinematographer Yu Lik-wai, and Sellars—came together in the autumn of 2020 to create this 79-minute work, which seeks to explore the deepest of human experiences—health and mortality, spirituality, and transcendence—all heightened by the pandemic. Filmed in real-time via a specially created digital platform, with the artists collaborating remotely from Portland, Amsterdam, and Hangzhou, China, this work’s purpose became all the more immediate as illness changed the world in a matter of months. It now stands as a major artistic response to the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. 
 
“this body is so impermanent…” features cinematography by Yu Lik-wai, sound design By Shahrokh Yadegari, editing by Tim Squyres, English translation by Robert Thurman, and Chinese translation by Kumārajīva. 
 
The upcoming screenings include:
 
Wednesday, February 8, at 7 pm Upstate Films at the Starr in Rhinebeck, NY, featuring Ganavya Doraiswamy, Michael Schumacher, Peter Sellars, and Robert Thurman 
 
Thursday, February 9, at 7 pm Upstate Films at the Orpheum in Saugerties, NY, featuring Ganavya Doraiswamy, Michael Schumacher, Peter Sellars, and Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies at Bard College Dominique Townsend
 
Friday, February 10, at 7 pm at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, NY, with Peter Sellars and Tibetan doctor Kunga Wangdue discussing healing practices
 
Saturday, February 11, at 2 pm at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, NY, featuring Ganavya Doraiswamy, Michael Schumacher, Peter Sellars, Tim Squyres, and Yibin Wang 
 
Sunday, February 12, at 2 pm at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, NY, with Peter Sellars in conversation with palliative care physician Dr. Craig Blinderman and essayist and Dean of Columbia School of the Arts Carol Becker
 
Peter Sellars first began exploring artistic dramatizations of the Vimalakirti Sutra in 2011 at the Rubin Museum, where he staged a workshop and public rehearsal with Michael Schumacher and Kate Valk, and a conversation with Robert Thurman. In 2019, further plans to collaborate on a work surrounding the Vimalakirti Sutra began to materialize. Wang Dongling felt that he understood this text—in which the principal figure is not Buddha himself but Vimalakirti, a layperson who is ill—deeply in his mind and in his body. They originally intended to perform it in theaters and museums—and then, COVID-19 hit.
 
Says Sellars, “Gideon Lester of the Fisher Center at Bard suggested to us that in fact a Buddhist sutra does not belong in a theater or museum, but in cyberspace where the reality of a human body appearing in multiple universes instantly with a single thought is a daily miracle of the Internet.”
 
The Fisher Center took on a lead producing role in the project, following the success of their digital production of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest, directed by Ashley Tata. The project in its filmed form came together as the pandemic’s impact on all humanity escalated and laid our injustices and inequalities out before us. As it developed, it increasingly examined the connections between art and medicine—their focuses on healing, repair, and recovery. “this body is so impermanent…” (Vimalakirti Sutra, Chapter Two) came to encompass the notion that art creates a shared space, a glimpse of shared purpose and shared destinies, and can help translate immediate pain into longer-term meaning.
 
Describing the process of collaborating across continents, Sellars says, “We began rehearsing in quarantine on Zoom. Wang Dongling in his studio in Hangzhou at 3 pm in the afternoon, writing with ink and brush as he listened to Ganavya singing at midnight in a Sufi chapel outside of Portland, Oregon, who was in turn responding to Michael Schumacher dancing at 9 am in the morning light of his apartment in Amsterdam. Meanwhile the technical work was occurring at 3 am at Bard College in New York, where young inventors were writing new code for a platform to supersede Zoom with stunning new bandwidth that can render the depth and complexity of the human voice and show the hairs on Wang Dongling’s brush.”
 
In the Vimalakirti Sutra, Buddha sends his disciples to the sickbed of an enlightened lay person to hear his reflections on the fragility of physical being and the liberation of conscious awareness. The collaborators focused on two pages of Chapter II of The Vimalakirti Sutra, which Sellars describes as offering “one of the most profound and penetrating descriptions of the human body in early literature.” 
 
Through their response to the text, the artists consider well-being as a holistic state with intricate medical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions. Their project draws on how our bodies are delicate organisms which communicate and express multiplied layered realities; and how moral and ethical questions, a sense of justice, social and political equilibrium, and deep-seated life purpose are essential to the ability of human beings to function and flourish. 
 
Tickets for the upcoming screenings can be reserved through the Fisher Center’s website, here.

Post Date: 01-11-2023