The Fisher Center at Bard, in Partnership With the Civis Foundation, Establishes the Civis Hope Commissions, an Endowed Fund That Will Support New Performing Arts Works Exploring the Subject Of Hope

Fisher Center LAB, the Fisher Center’s Residency and Commissioning Program, Announces Three Inaugural Civis Hope Commissions:

• Jubilee, a New Musical with Libretto by Suzan-Lori Parks, Inspired by Scott Joplin’s Ragtime Opera Treemonisha, to Be Presented in a Semi-Staged Preview Directed by Steve H. Broadnax III in SummerScape 2025, with a Full World Premiere Production to Follow.

• A New Opera Composed by Courtney Bryan, Based on Tennessee Williams’ Play Suddenly Last Summer, Directed by Daniel Fish, with a Libretto by Gideon Lester and Daniel Fish.

• A New Musical Adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Celebrated Short Story Yentl the Yeshiva Boy by Barrie Kosky, Lisa Kron, and Adam Benzwi—the First Original Production Kosky Will Create in the U.S.

With the Launch of The Civis Hope Commissions, Fisher Center LAB Continues to Expand its Reputation as a Source of Major New Works in the Performing Arts

“The point about hope is that it is something that occurs in very dark moments. It is like a flame in the darkness.”—John Berger

“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible.”
—bell hooks

“Art is the highest form of hope.”—Gerhard Richter

Fisher Center LAB, one of the country’s leading multidisciplinary producing organizations, offering extraordinary support to artists to realize ambitious and visionary projects, has received a landmark gift from Civis Foundation to establish the Civis Hope Commissions. The gift creates an endowed commissioning fund that will support, in perpetuity, the development and production of major new works in the performing arts that explore the subject of hope. These productions will have a common framework: They will support contemporary artists who will examine, interrogate, and transform American artifacts, archival materials, or artworks from the past to imagine a more perfect, just, and hopeful future.

Projects supported by the Civis Hope Commissions will be developed, produced, and premiered at the Fisher Center at Bard, a landmark Frank Gehry-designed performing arts center on the campus of Bard College, and will subsequently tour nationally and internationally.

The Civis Hope Commissions will be supported by a gift of $2.5 million from Civis, doubled by matching funds at Bard College to create an initial endowment for this program of $5 million. With the establishment of this Fund, Fisher Center LAB’s track record of artistic excellence and Bard College’s educational mission are united with the ideals of Civis, a foundation that supports artistic and cultural expressions investigating what it means to live amongst others.
 

Inaugural Commissions Announced

The Fisher Center at Bard, today, announced the first three Civis Hope Commissions, which Fisher Center LAB—the Fisher Center’s residency and commissioning program—will develop, produce, and premiere. (The LAB will also tour productions nationally and internationally, so they reach the broadest possible audiences.)

These first three commissions bring together outstanding contemporary artists who will respond to artworks from the past and, in doing so, develop three timely stories of young women—Treemonisha, Catherine Holly, and Yentl—who dare to challenge the status quo.  These commissions will be produced over the next three years, with announcements of dates to follow.

The first commission is Jubilee, a new musical by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog), inspired by Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha, and directed by Steve H. Broadnax III. It joins the lineup of SummerScape 2025, the “hotbed of intellectual and aesthetic adventure” (The New York Times), as a semi-staged, first-glimpse preview. Replete with dancing bears and bags of luck, and set on the day after the Emancipation Proclamation, Jubilee joyfully asks what the world might become when all people are truly free. Parks has drawn inspiration from Joplin’s 1910 ragtime opera to create a magical, hilarious, and timely fable about a young woman who leads her community out of adversity and into a new way of being. This summer’s public readings of Parks’ libretto will offer audiences a rare opportunity to engage directly with the development of a major new musical, which the Fisher Center will premiere as a full production in the near future, once a composer has been chosen to write music for the project.

The second commission is the world premiere of an opera based on Tennessee Williams’ play Suddenly Last Summer, his Southern Gothic one-act play set in the Garden District of New Orleans in 1936 that tells the dramatic story of the wealthy Venable family, and a young woman’s struggle to speak truth to power. Suddenly Last Summer is composed by MacArthur Fellow and “pianist and composer of panoramic interests” (The New York Times) Courtney Bryan and directed by Tony nominee Daniel Fish (whose acclaimed Oklahoma! was commissioned and premiered at Bard SummerScape before being presented at St. Ann’s Warehouse and eventually transferring to Broadway and the West End). Fish co-writes the libretto with Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester.

The third commission will give new form to a work by a second American literary legend: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s whimsical and mysterious story Yentl the Yeshiva Boy is given thrilling theatrical life in a new musical conceived by acclaimed theater and opera director Barrie Kosky and two-time Tony-winning writer playwright, performer, and author Lisa Kron. Fun Home lyricist/book-writer Kron likewise pens the book and lyrics for this new adaptation, with music composed by frequent Kosky collaborator Adam Benzwi, adapting and transforming melodies from the American and European Yiddish theater and music hall traditions, as well as the emotionally resonant canon of Hasidic choral music. Kosky, “one of the busiest and most brilliant, not to mention entertaining, directors working… today” (New York Times), stages the world premiere adaptation of Singer’s story of a teenage girl in a Polish shtetl who, in order to be true to herself, decides to live as a boy and pursue her forbidden dream of studying Torah.
 

More About the Civis Hope Commissions

The launch of the Hope Commissions coincides with the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the inspiring, if flawed, charter that called for an end of tyrannical monarchy, and in July 1776, declared: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This approaching anniversary offers a chance to reflect anew on the words of the Declaration, and to ask: How can we help expand the meaning of these words to apply more equitably to all people? What do we dream the US might become in its second 250 years? What does ‘hope’ mean for us now? Inspired by James Baldwin, who wrote, "To encounter oneself is to encounter the other," and “Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other," the Civis Hope Commissions will explore how we engage with others, how we embrace “the other,” as part of “we the people,” and how we retain hope for American democracy that embraces all.

“From ancient times, theater and the performing arts have always functioned as a laboratory of hope,” says Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester. “Artists help us to imagine new ways of being in the world, and art can awaken our consciousness. In some of the most turbulent chapters of human history, live performance has been a vital source of hope, resistance, transformation, and joy. Thanks to the generosity of T. Eric Galloway and the Civis Foundation, generations of audiences and students will be able to explore this eternal relationship between art and hope.”

“We are profoundly grateful to Eric Galloway and Civis Arts and Letters for their visionary philanthropy,” said Leon Botstein, President of Bard. “The subject of this new program, and the generosity of its endowment, will help secure the vital role that the arts must play in highlighting the virtues, rights and privileges of a democracy by sustaining a vibrant, shared public sphere, which is the hallmark of freedom.”

“Given our commitment to advancing ‘the common good,’ Civis applauds how Bard and the Fisher Center have embraced the Hope Commissions,” said T. Eric Galloway, President of Civis. “We believe more than ever in the power of performance to activate our shared connection and to spark cross-boundary conversations that lead to personal fulfillment through, not despite, others.”

Fisher Center LAB, which develops, produces, and premieres the commissions, has established an international reputation for its new works and revivals that offer bold interpretations of documents from the past, reinventing them for the future. From Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! to SCAT!, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s dream of the Great Migration, to Pam Tanowitz’s meditation on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and the Biblical Song of Songs, to Justin Peck and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s dance-theater adaptation of Sufjan Stevens’ album Illinoise, the Fisher Center LAB’s commissions have long reached into the past to weave compelling and urgent visions that speak to our times and face the future. The distinguished Bard Music Festival and the Fisher Center’s opera program also focus on the reexamination and reclamation of past works for contemporary audiences—creating a context-rich program across all disciplines of the performing arts on the campus of one of this country’s most prestigious liberal arts institutions.

The Civis Hope Commissions will secure this legacy for future generations, providing generous development and production support in perpetuity for Fisher Center LAB’s major artistic commissions in theater, dance, and live arts. Civis, through its collaboration with the Fisher Center, hopes to imagine and, in doing so, make a future in which all can pursue true happiness more possible.
 

About Civis Foundation

Civis advances the common good by supporting Arts & Letters initiatives that foster awareness of and responsibility for our interdependent future. Guided by a commitment to civic awareness and responsibility, we invest in work that aspires to demonstrate how turning encounters with the other into authentic relationships is foundational to a sustainable, just, and equitable society. We pursue our work directly and in collaboration with others whose missions align with ours.

About the Fisher Center at Bard and Fisher Center LAB

The Fisher Center is a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education that demonstrates Bard College’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. To support artists, students, and audiences in the examination of artistic ideas, the Fisher Center develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire.

Home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. This world-class theater building will be complemented by a new studio building designed by Maya Lin, scheduled to open in 2026. More than 200 events and 50,000 visitors are hosted at the Fisher Center each year, and over 300 professional artists are employed annually. As a powerful catalyst of art-making regionally, nationally, and worldwide, the Fisher Center produces 8 to 10 major new works in various disciplines every year. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard College, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Building on a 165-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders.

Through Fisher Center LAB, the Center’s acclaimed residency and commissioning program, artists are provided with custom-made support toward their innovative projects, and their work has been seen in over 100 communities around the world. Resident choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s 2018 Four Quartets was recognized as “the most important work of dance theater so far this century” by The New York Times. In 2019, the Fisher Center won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical for Daniel Fish’s production of Oklahoma!, which began life in 2007 as an undergraduate production at Bard and was produced professionally by the Fisher Center in 2015 before transferring to New York City. Illinoise, a 2023 Fisher Center world premiere from artists Sufjan Stevens, Justin Peck, and Jackie Sibblies Drury, was recognized with a Tony Award for Best Choreography following its tour and transfer to Broadway.

The Fisher Center is generously supported by Carolyn Marks Blackwood and Gregory H. Quinn, Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, Felicitas S. Thorne, Andrew E. Zobler, the Advisory Board of the Fisher Center, Fisher Center members and general fund donors, the Educational Foundation of America, the Smokler/Hebert Family Fund, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Fisher Center LAB is funded by the Lucille Lortel Foundation and the Fisher Center's Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and additional funding from The William and Lia G. Poorvu Family Foundation. The Pam Tanowitz Creation Fund is supported by the Friends of Pam with leadership gifts from an anonymous donor, Angela Bernstein CBE, and Lizbeth and George Krupp. Major development support for the Fisher Center’s Hope Commissions is received from the Fisher Center’s Hope Commissions Fund, endowed by the Civis Foundation and Bard College.

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About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,200 park-like acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 13 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 165-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders.  For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.

For more information, please contact Blake Zidell of Blake Zidell & Associates at blake@blakezidell.com or 917.572.2943.
 

Website: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/arts/civis-hope-commissions-fisher-center-bard.html

This event was last updated on 04-01-2025

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