ABSTRACT
Sellars was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1957, serving an apprenticeship as a puppeteer with Pittsburgh’s Lovelace Marionettes while still a teenager. Sellars’s formative year in Paris is the starting point for this interview, conducted in London in October 2007. Here he reflects on how his practice has been shaped by European political realities since 1968 and what the wider implications of the social, economic, and cultural shifts in the Continent might involve for modes of making theatre. For Idomeneo, which opened the Salzburg Festival in 2019, he crafted a staging where George Tsypin’s set provided footage of the plastic that is destroying the ocean right now and is in every one of our bloodstreams at this moment. The main American artists of that generation, Meredith Monk, Bob Wilson, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, they all existed because of Europe. They worked intimately in their lofts and then dreamt big in Europe.
