Can you teach creativity?
Matthew Suttor’s research into this question draws on over twenty years’ experience in classrooms and rehearsal rooms at Yale University where he is Program Manager at the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) and Senior Lecturer in Theater and Performance Studies.
With a background in computer music, Matthew’s operas, theatre and dance works frequently combine electronics with acoustic forces.
His latest opera—I AM ALAN TURING—explores Artificial Intelligence and how we understand our place in the universe.
Matthew’s works have been presented at Bard, BAM and the Guggenheim in the United States, and internationally at the New Zealand Festival of the Arts and the Mozart Prague Festival.
For collaborations, or to enquire about lessons and mentorship, click here.
Matthew also gives talks and workshops on ways to teach creativity. Inquire.
LOIMATA, The Sweetest Tears
New Zealand International Film Festival, 2020.
Director Anna Marbrook honours the last voyage of the great waka maker, sailor and mentor Ema Siope, whose journeys between Aotearoa and Sāmoa in search of healing, and her family’s reckoning with systemic abuse, are powerfully documented.
“A stirring and visually gripping documentary… honouring the life and times of a great woman whose wake will be felt for years to come.”
- Michael Andrew, Asia Pacific Report
An Enemy of the People
Yale Repertory Theatre, 2017
A small Norwegian town is banking on its medicinal baths to bring prosperity. But its economic growth and moral health are threatened when Dr. Thomas Stockmann uncovers a toxic secret that pits him against his brother, Mayor Peter Stockmann. In Ibsen's thrilling political masterpiece, a family in power struggles over its obligations to each other and to society: who is the enemy of the people, and who is their benefactor?
By Henrik Ibsen
New Translation by Paul Walsh
Directed by James Bundy
Blood Memory
This short film debuted as a projection on the Beinecke Library for Yale's LUX Festival, 2015.
A film project commissioned by Kenyon Adams, artist in residence at Yale University and Director of the Arts at Grace Farms, as a response to personal experiences with racial profiling.
Director: Kenyon Adams
Director of Photography: Andrew Ellis
Producer: Jon Seale
Editor: Souki Mehdaoui
Score: Matthew Suttor and Kenyon Adams
Arcadia
Yale Repertory Theatre, 2015
Amidst illicit passions and professional rivalries on an English country estate, a brilliant young pupil proposes a startling scientific theory well beyond her own comprehension. More than 200 years later, two academic adversaries try to piece together puzzling clues from the past in their quest for an elusive truth. Arcadia is an achingly romantic and heartbreakingly funny waltz of mind and body dancing through time.
By Tom Stoppard
Directed by James Bundy
Real Pasifik
Television series, New Zealand, 2013
Robert Oliver, acclaimed international chef and social entrepreneur presents Real Pasifik, an epic gastronomic journey. We travel across the South Pacific Islands and New Zealand where we meet extraordinary people, ancient cultures and dive into the heart of one of the most exciting cuisines in the world. Each week Robert Oliver arrives at a top resort in a new country and lays down a challenge. Over the next week the resort's aspiring young chefs have the chance of a lifetime -- together they will create a multi-course indigenous meal using only local ingredients.
La Prose du Transibérien
Off-Broadway Theatre, New Haven, 2013
A multimedia concert reading of Blaise Cendrars' modernist poem, printed in 1913 in the form of an accordion book with illuminations by the painter Sonia Delaunay. The book was claimed to be the first simultaneous art work, in which color and word were to be absorbed as one and the same. The projections created a visual score that became intertwined with the music and text. Set to an original composition by Matthew Suttor.
Directed by Liz Diamond; featuring actor Max Gordon Moore and the Jasper String Quartet with clarinetist Ashley William Smith.
A Winter’s Tale
Yale Repertory Theatre, 2012.
Suspicious that his wife Hermione has been unfaithful, King Leontes of Sicilia imprisons the queen, orders the death of her suspected lover, and banishes his own newborn daughter. But callous hearts are redeemed—and broken ones mended—when the abandoned orphan falls in love with a Bohemian prince. The Winter's Tale leaps from darkest tragedy to lighthearted romance and a truly magical conclusion.
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Liz Diamond
The Trial of the Cannibal Dog
Opera commissioned by the New Zealand Festival, 2008.
The Trial of the Cannibal Dog combines operatic and non-operatic voices, European and Maori instrumental performance, a chorus of seadogs, and live digital audio processing to create a unique form of musical theatre that blends contemporary and 18th century English styles. With a cast from New Zealand and Australia, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog traces Cook’s downfall in a story that still resonates to this day.
Adapted by Matthew Suttor (composer), John Downie (librettist), and Christian Penny (director) from the book by Anne Salmond.
Teaching Creativity
In 2020 I gave a series of talks about teaching creativity, two at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design & Space, and another at the Arts in Society Conference, which was held in Lisbon.
The talks investigate methods developed from different disciplines at the Yale School of Drama to teach creativity to students individually and in collaborative groups. I focus, in particular, on the multi-disciplinary work my students make for Gallery + Drama, a series of performances and installations created by students from the School of Drama in response to the Yale University Art Gallery collection.
This coming spring, we plan to hold this class at Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, beginning a new, exciting chapter in cross-institutional collaboration at Yale.
Professor in the Practice of Sound Design and Stage Management at Yale School of Drama, and Director of Beechman Center for Theatrical Sound and Music, New Zealand-born composer Matthew Suttor has taught at Yale University since 1999, first in the Department of Music and, since 2002, at the School of Drama. He is also affiliate faculty at the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media at Yale (CCAM).
Suttor’s work in opera and dance includes Don Juan in Prague, in collaboration with director David Chambers, for the Bard SummerScape Festival and revised for the Mozart Prague Festival, the Guggenheim Works and Process series, ands the BAM Next Wave Festival. I Find Comfort in Thunder for the Folkwang Tanzstudio, Essen, toured Germany, and his opera, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, premiered at the International Festival of the Arts, Wellington, New Zealand, and was broadcast by Radio New Zealand.
Concert works, installations, and television scores include Syntagma, commissioned by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, La Prose du Transsibérien, for narrator and chamber ensemble, and HxWxL, both commissioned by the Beinecke Library. The Eastman School of Music commissioned Buntpapier, and he composed the score for Zoomslide’s television series Real Pasifik. Yale Repertory Theatre productions include The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow, All’s Well That Ends Well, The Winter’s Tale, Arcadia, and An Enemy of the People. A Fulbright Scholar, Suttor received a doctorate in composition from Columbia University.
