Free Screening Saturday, April 17 at 7:00 pm at the Hammer Museum
Followed by Q & A with Award-Winning Filmmaker Jon Else
Los Angeles, CA – Sundance Institute will host a free screening of director Jon Else’s documentary film Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle this Saturday, April 17 at 7 pm at the Hammer Museum (10899 Wilshire Blvd at Westwood in Los Angeles) as part of the LA Opera’s historic Ring Festival LA, taking place from April 15 through June 30, 2010. As one of the Ring Festival LA cultural partners, Sundance Institute will be hosting the screening of this acclaimed documentary followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Jon Else.
Sundance Institute presents Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle
Saturday, April 17 at 7:00pm
Hammer Museum, Billy Wilder Theater (10899 Wilshire Blvd); Los Angeles, CA 90024; 310.443.7000 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              310.443.7000      end_of_the_skype_highlighting
Free Screening
Followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Jon Else
This program is free and open to the public. Tickets are required, and are available at the Billy Wilder Theater Box Office one hour prior to start time. Reservations not accepted. Parking is available under the museum for $3 after 6:00 p.m. Visit http://hammer.ucla.edu
LA Opera has joined forces with Sundance Institute and other Los Angeles cultural and educational institutions to stage the first significant citywide cultural festival since the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival. Ring Festival LA will showcase a wide variety of exhibitions, symposia, museum shows, conferences, and special events. All of these events will be thematically related to the first-ever presentation in Los Angeles of Richard Wagner’s famed four-opera drama, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).
Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999 and won the coveted Filmmaker Trophy. In this award-winning documentary acclaimed filmmaker John Else goes back stage at the San Francisco Opera’s production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle to show this rare event from the point of view of union stagehands. Electrifying time-lapse photography of the onstage action is juxtaposed with the epic drama happening behind the scenes as stagehands hoist giant mechanical dragons, move thousand-pound sets, catch up on some baseball, knit sweaters and play a fierce game of poker. Sing Faster offers a unique and wry perspective on Wagner’s outlandish operatic spectacle. (David Courier, Senior Programmer, Sundance Film Festival).
Jon Else produced and directed The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb (1980), Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven (1989), A Job at Ford’s for the PBS series The Great Depression (1992), Cadillac Desert : Water and the Transformation Of Nature (1997), Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle (2000), Open Outcry (2001). He was series producer and cinematographer for Eyes On The Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1987), produced and directed Wonders Are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic (2005), and photographed Inside Guantanamo and Afghanistan: Hell Of A Nation. He is a MacArthur Fellow and directs the documentary program at the UCB Graduate School Of Journalism, Berkeley.
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