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Beyond the Stage
“Exile & Sanctuary”: The Politics of Hospitality
“Exile & Sanctuary”: The Politics of Hospitality
History of the Sanctuary Movement in the US
Produced and directed by Mina Girgis, Cal Performances’ Director of Education, Campus and Community Engagement; Directed and edited by Lindsay Gauthier. Full credits below.
Cal Performances’ 2025–26 season of Illuminations programming draws from the performing arts and UC Berkeley scholarship to explore the theme of “Exile & Sanctuary.” Hospitality has long been a fundamental ethic across cultures, yet in modern times, it has become a flashpoint of political debate. The Sanctuary Movement—born not from progressive politics but from conservative Christian values—offers a surprising origin story for today’s struggles over migration, refuge, and belonging. In this conversation, we examine how the act of offering sanctuary shifted from a moral obligation to a contested “liberal cause,” and what this history reveals about the power and limits of hospitality in a divided world.
This video features Leti Volpp, PhD, UC Berkeley’s Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice; Angela Marino, PhD, UC Berkeley professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; Stephanie Zonszein, PhD, UC Berkeley professor of Political Science; and Alex Saum-Pascual, PhD, UC Berkeley professor of Spanish and Portuguese, and member of the Executive Board for Berkeley Center for New Media.
For more on our 2025–26 season and our Illuminations programming, visit calperformances.org/illuminations.
Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Leti Volpp:
There’s a saying: “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us. We are here because you were there.” In other words, we have migrated to the metropole from the colony because you were colonizing us in the past.
Angela Marino:
So if you’re Campesino and you’re in exile from a condition of violence, you might try to find sanctuary within the United States, but you’re in the heart of the beast looking for sanctuary from the very machinery all the way around that’s never facing what it actually did to cause that immigration in the first place.
Stephanie Zonszein:
For the displaced, even after living in a place for different generations, they’re still confronting the fact that they do not have full access to participation in society, the economy, politics.
Alex Saum-Pascual:
If we are understanding sanctuary as providing safety and protection to somebody who is endangered or feeling any kind of prosecution, it seems like the moral thing to do. It’s common sense. The problem comes when we redefine those people seeking exile as enemies or villains.
THE SANCTUARY MOVEMENT
Leti Volpp:
So the origins of the Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s began because members of religious communities saw that there was terrible violence in Latin America. In particular, the United States was helping arm and fund very repressive regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador. And in the process, almost a million people fled and came to the United States. At the same time, once those Guatemalans and Salvadorans applied for asylum, the rate of approval was between 1 and 3%, while the average rate of approval of asylum generally was about 30%.
Angela Marino:
I remember… a young man coming to my house when I was a kid, and hearing the story of what the paramilitary in El Salvador supported by the United States had done to their family members. It was torture. It was dismemberment. It was the most atrocious cruelty. And that kind of violence that was produced by the state was a condition of exile and sanctuary that was never heard about really in the mainstream of U.S. political discourse or political cultures. It remained something that people have fought for in the interfaith community to bring forward for as a Sanctuary Movement.
Leti Volpp:
So there was this, I think, very well-founded perception, which was that the United States essentially supported these military dictatorships that were producing all of these refugees, who then were not being recognized as actual refugees when they came to the United States. So members of religious organizations started feeding people, sheltering people, transporting people, providing them with legal aid, and there were a number of people who actually were criminally prosecuted for their activities as part of the Sanctuary Movement. So I think their linguistic similarities—obviously colonial regimes bring a language with them that they force the people they’re colonizing to learn, and it becomes the language of colonial administration. There become immigration pathways that exist for people from former colonies that shape why people go to the so-called metropole from the colony.
THE POLITICS OF HOSPITALITY
Stephanie Zonszein:
Starting perhaps in the 1990s, just at the end of the Sanctuary Movement… Before this, we had the two parties taking very similar positions in terms of immigration policy, so both parties would be wanting to give more rights to immigrants who were already in the U.S. But in the 1990s is when we see these two parties diverging in their policies, voters now starting to understand then immigration policy and immigration in general as something that is politicized: If you support the Democratic Party, then you’re liberal, and then you’re supporting more inclusionary policies If you’re supporting the Republican Party, then you’re not.
Alex Saum-Pascual:
I think “hospitality,” like any other word, can be activated to mean many different things that serve different intentions and with different power structures behind. So, when polarization is thriving and creating a certain battle over meaning, “hospitality” will be a word that can be activated to mean its complete opposite even.
Leti Volpp:
To whether or not I think of sanctuary as essentially a liberal act, I feel like it’s a human act. It’s a humane act. It’s recognizing that the stranger is the neighbor, is potentially the loved one.
Alex Saum-Pascual:
You could think of that as “liberal politics,” but if you’re thinking about just aiding people to escape possible death, it just seems the moral thing to do. There’s nothing inherently “liberal” about that.
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“Exile & Sanctuary”: Sanctuary and the Search for Belonging
“Exile & Sanctuary”: Sanctuary and the Search for Belonging
“Sanctuary is something that is much more personal. It can be a moment, it can be a song.”
Produced and directed by Mina Girgis, Cal Performances’ Director of Education, Campus and Community Engagement; Directed and edited by Lindsay Gauthier. Full credits below.
Cal Performances’ 2025–26 season of Illuminations programming draws from the performing arts and UC Berkeley scholarship to explore the theme of “Exile & Sanctuary.” As we define it, sanctuary is a word of hope, a place we long for when the world feels fractured. Whether born from exile or from the universal human yearning for belonging, the search for sanctuary shapes our lives and our art. In this conversation, we reflect on the tensions between home and homelessness, loss and arrival, hope and memory.
This video features Drew Dir and Ben Kaufman, Co-Artistic Directors of Manual Cinema; Leti Volpp, PhD, UC Berkeley’s Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice; Alex Saum-Pascual, PhD, UC Berkeley professor of Spanish and Portuguese, and member of the Executive Board for Berkeley Center for New Media; Julia Keefe, jazz vocalist, actor, activist, and educator; Lara Downes, pianist and radio Host; Angela Marino, PhD, UC Berkeley professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; and SanSan Kwan, PhD, professor and chair of UC Berkeley’s department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies.
For more on our 2025–26 season and our Illuminations programming, visit calperformances.org/illuminations.
Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Drew Dir:
Not all of us have experienced the kind of political or physical violence of actual exile, but all of us have sought refuge from work, from the stress of daily life, trouble with relationships or family life. We all need some kind of sanctuary.
DEFINING SANCTUARY
Leti Volpp:
If we think about sanctuary, it has very old roots. There are traditions of sanctuary across various great religions.
Alex Saum-Pascual:
The word I guess originates from a sense of a spiritual veneration, but I also like to think about it in its English connotation as a nature reserve, as a place that we create or we secure to regroup endangered species, allowing folks to regroup, to heal, and then fly free.
Drew Dir:
When you pair exile and sanctuary together, it almost sounds like sanctuary is the natural happy ending of exile, and I think a lot of Manual Cinema’s work deals with characters who are seeking a kind of sanctuary that they think they want, and then when they find it, they discover that it comes at a cost or it provides material sanctuary, but not spiritual sanctuary. The ambiguity around different forms of sanctuary, and who’s providing the sanctuary, and for what reasons, is an idea that we find very intimidating.
EXILE AND SANCTUARY
Julia Keefe:
I think they live in the same house together. You can find sanctuary after exile. You can find sanctuary before exile. You can find sanctuary within exile.
Lara Downes:
I don’t know that the act of being in exile necessarily introduces you to sanctuary. It can on some level. You are physically safe. Are you emotionally safe? No. I mean, I think that that’s such a part of the experience that you’re always like… You’re always broken. There’s always a part of you that’s missing because you left it back there.
Angela Marino:
I don’t know anyone who’s sought sanctuary [or] been in exile who has been unclear about what the journey actually is about or for. I think they’re so clear that it hits the nervous system every day.
Lara Downes:
You can’t go back to the way a relationship was yesterday or the way that your body every day is getting old. You can’t go back. So I suppose we’re in permanent exile in some way.
CHOICE
Alex Saum-Pascual:
On the one hand, we may think that there’s no choice in exile. But there could be a certain opportunity in leaving your country to find better reception for your ideas and to influence and change the culture of the other place. On the other side, we may not have choice around sanctuary because in many cases it may be a question of life and death. And unless we decide that helping someone [or] protecting someone from an imminent threat and death is a choice, then sanctuary shouldn’t be.
Angela Marino:
When we’re witness to exile or sanctuary, it’s an invitation for us to come together and to, as a community, resolve what those issues are.
Leti Volpp:
So in addition to religious organizations, we can also think of the so-called “sanctuary jurisdiction.” So cities, counties, states, they have decided to not use their own resources to assist in federal efforts to engage in immigration enforcement. They’re deciding to position themselves, their communities, as safe and welcoming places for people who are in exile, people who are refugees, people who are undocumented immigrants.
THE SEARCH FOR SANCTUARY
Alex Saum-Pascual:
The sense of sanctuary can be quite unique to those people fleeing political prosecution. In the case of the political condition of a political refugee, and in that case is a very clear condition. But if we’re thinking about sanctuary in more spiritual or metaphorical terms, I feel that’s more of a universal feeling.
Julia Keefe:
The human experience is painful no matter who you are or where you come from. You experience pain and you experience loss and you experience grief. You experience anger.
SANCTUARY AND ART
Julia Keefe:
Sanctuary is something that is much more personal. It can be a moment, it can be a song. It can be a lifelong spiritual practice. My artistic sanctuary is being up on the bandstand with my band, being able to be in performance with these amazing artists, and meditating and practicing this music, and sharing this music with an audience.
Lara Downes:
More and more I’m aware that when I share my music in any kind of a room, any kind of a space with others, it is an essential safe space. I think that is the value of it. I think that is the superpower of it.
SanSan Kwan:
Dance as a recreational practice can serve as a form of individual sanctuary, a space somatically for people to express longings for home, experiences of home, cherishing of home. I also believe that dance is a collaborative form, and when done in community, can create a real sense of collective empowerment, a sense of belonging.
Angela Marino:
First step I think is really understanding the capacity of the theater to bring about the kind of social change that a lot of us are envisioning and that we need in this moment.
SanSan Kwan:
I mean, just moving to a shared rhythm is itself kinesthetically a feeling of community.
Angela Marino:
If the empathy bridge is really going to be there and we’re trying to open that empathy bridge, it will collapse without having foundations. And the foundations should be rooted in the actual conditions that people face, and understanding what is the purpose of that empathy if not to actually generate the kind of world that we prefer to live in.
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“Exile & Sanctuary”: The Art of Exile
“Exile & Sanctuary”: The Art of Exile
“I think the art that is created in exile is a reflection of the unconquerable strength of the human spirit.”
Produced and directed by Mina Girgis, Cal Performances’ Director of Education, Campus and Community Engagement; Directed and edited by Lindsay Gauthier. Full credits below.
Cal Performances’ 2025–26 season of Illuminations programming draws from the performing arts and UC Berkeley scholarship to explore the theme of “Exile & Sanctuary.” As we define it, exile is more than a movement across borders—it is a rupture in belonging, a break in the story of self. In this conversation, we explore what it means to live and create in displacement: how exile reshapes identity, fuels creativity, and leaves traces in the art born from it.
This video features Julia Keefe, jazz vocalist, actor, activist, and educator; SanSan Kwan, PhD, professor and chair of UC Berkeley’s department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; Alex Saum-Pascual, PhD, UC Berkeley professor of Spanish and Portuguese, and member of the Executive Board for Berkeley Center for New Media; Leti Volpp, PhD, UC Berkeley’s Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice; and Lara Downes, pianist and radio Host.
For more on our 2025–26 season and our Illuminations programming, visit calperformances.org/illuminations.
Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Julia Keefe:
The choice to leave your homeland is because it’s no longer livable for you and your family and your community and your descendants.
SanSan Kwan:
There is an energetic difference between the term “exile” and the term “migration”. When I think about the term “exile,” it means that someone is forcibly moved from one place to another against their will.
Alex Saum-Pascual:
You may choose to exile to a place and then use that possession of power from outside to influence and change the culture from the country you are leaving behind.
Leti Volpp:
Communities of people in exile long for a past that predated their needing to leave.
Lara Downes:
I have this tattoo on my arm. It says, “Here by the Pacific Ocean, it’s a long way from home.” And that’s my dad’s handwriting. He wrote this just when I was born and he was putting me to sleep at night and worrying about my existence in the world.
DEFINING EXILE
Leti Volpp:
There’s no legal definition of the term “exile.”
Alex Saum-Pascual:
I mean, it can range from just feeling other… by being in a country or a culture that is not your primary, but also, it could be an actual political situation of forced displacement.
Leti Volpp:
There is a legal definition of the term “refugee”: “One that has either experienced past persecution or has a well-founded fear of future persecution on account of one of five grounds: race, religion, national origin, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” And the refugee is somebody who has been forced to leave their home. They’re unable or unwilling to live in their country because they’re being persecuted, either by the state or by private actors that the state is unable to control. They’ve had to find another place to live.
Alex Saum-Pascual:
And in that sense, it’s definitely different from just feeling out of place or feeling othered. You may actually feel more at home in a foreign country when you’re feeling endangered by your own.
Lara Downes:
I think there’s a reason that Americans are obsessed with their roots. How do you feel at home in a place where most of us have not been for that long? I mean, most of us can’t trace our families back all that many American generations, so there’s always this feeling of where do I come from? And what did somebody have to do to leave that place? And why did they leave that place?
VIOLENCE
Alex Saum-Pascual:
The question of violence around exile is very complicated. We could be talking about material, physical, bodily threat, and in that case, violence definitely comes to the forefront. But then there could be other kinds of more subtle violence.
Leti Volpp:
The analogy I think about is a tree that’s being uprooted. There’s a violence involved in pulling that tree from the ground, pulling the roots from the ground, right? And so if we think of the person who’s forced to go into exile as having to leave their home, it seems like it would necessarily involve that kind of violence.
Alex Saum-Pascual:
When there’s external forces that are molding or shaping your behavior, when you don’t have the freedom to choose or be in the place of your choosing, that is a violent situation. It doesn’t come with bodily harm, but it comes with a psychological damage that comes from not being free to make your own choices.
THE RIGHT TO HAVE RIGHTS
Leti Volpp:
Something that I think about a lot are the writings of Hannah Arendt, who wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism. Essentially, you need a political body that actually will protect your rights. So when you think of the person who is in exile, the person who’s a refugee, they need a new nation state, a new political body to protect their rights. We could think, for example, of lesser protections where people are still considered members of a particular political community. Maybe they’re not fully citizens, but we think that they deserve some kind of membership. And certainly, when you think about the United States’ framework, the idea of the Constitution, persons are protected. You don’t need to be a citizen, for example, to be guaranteed due process or equal protection.
DISPLACEMENT AND CREATIVITY
SanSan Kwan:
Migration and exile have shaped the dance forms that we know today. When African and enslaved peoples were brought to the United States, plantation owners forbade them to play the drums, and so thus, tap was born, because they found other ways to embody the percussive traditions that they knew about without drums, but instead, with their bodies.
Julia Keefe:
There’s beauty in building community and reaching out and holding hands and knowing that you’re not alone in that experience, in the pain of the loss of language or the loss of culture, the loss of spiritual practices, the loss of life. There’s beauty in community, in that connection, and it also is a calling to rebuild, to reclaim, to keep moving forward, to honor the sacrifices that were made by continuing to uplift the next generation of Indigenous people.
THE ART OF EXILE
Julia Keefe:
The human experience of loss is a unifier. The human experience of resilience is a unifier. The human experience of expression is a unifier. Regardless of what happens, we dance and we sing and we create. It is our human nature. It transcends identity.
Lara Downes:
So 200 years ago, the reality in my family was not any kind of a dream for anyone, right? For my dad’s family, who eventually came to Harlem via Jamaica, I don’t know at what point in colonialism and enslavement they were experiencing life 200 years ago. My Jewish family from Eastern Europe, also not great 200 years ago. So I just think that in my blood is this spirit of self-expression as survival.
Julia Keefe:
I think the art that is created in exile is a reflection of the unconquerable strength of the human spirit.
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The Freedom of Change
The Freedom of Change
As Cal Performances’ 2025–26 Artist in Residence, the pianist from Iceland invites audiences into an ever-evolving dialogue between past and present.
By Thomas May, Cal Performances-commissioned writer, critic, educator, and translator
“You should always try to escape your own success,” Víkingur Ólafsson says. “Because that success so easily turns against you and limits you and your choices and what you want to do next.”
At 41, Ólafsson, who is Cal Performances’ Artist in Residence for the 2025–26 season, has already carved out a career of extraordinary prominence and individuality in the classical music world. By the end of 2024, his recordings had amassed more than one billion streams, and his recent album of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations (on Deutsche Grammophon) earned him the 2025 Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo—a notable milestone in a field crowded with interpretations as hotly debated as they are revered.
The last pianist to win a Grammy for this work was no less than Glenn Gould, honored posthumously in 1983 for his famous second studio recording of the Goldbergs. In temperament and interpretive style, Ólafsson stands worlds apart—yet ever since the New York Times dubbed him “the Icelandic Glenn Gould,” the comparison persistently resurfaces.
“Víkingur is a formidable pianist, which of course is the baseline for anyone who has a career as an international piano soloist,” says Jeremy Geffen, Executive and Artistic Director of Cal Performances. “But there is also a brutal, uncompromising honesty about the way he understands his own playing. He possesses an extraordinary capacity to express his ideas exactly in the way that he envisions them.”
For all this acclaim, Ólafsson has made a quiet art of eluding the potential traps of success—and thereby continuing to surprise music-lovers. “It’s dangerous to get celebrated for anything, because then everybody wants to steer you only in that one direction,” he observes. “You need to avoid getting pinned down.”
Though Ólafsson only made his San Francisco Symphony debut in 2022 and first performed at UC Berkeley last year—one of the astonishing 88 destinations on his global Goldbergs tour—Bay Area audiences have had a front-row seat to a musical journey shaped by omnivorous curiosity and a fierce imperative to change. This past January, he appeared with the San Francisco Symphony for the world premiere of John Adams’ After the Fall, composed expressly for him. Ólafsson also pivoted at a moment’s notice from his duo program with fellow star pianist Yuja Wang, originally scheduled at Davies Hall in April, to a solo performance of the Goldbergs (when Wang had to withdraw due to injury).
For his Cal Performances residency, Ólafsson returns to UC Berkeley for two orchestral concerts with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra and conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali (October 18–19, Zellerbach Hall [ZH]) and, in the spring, a solo recital built around Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 109, the first of the composer’s final three sonatas for the piano (April 29, ZH). Each offers a different lens on the pianist’s artistic range—from large-scale virtuosity to intimate introspection.
The Architecture of a Recital
Originally, Ólafsson had planned to follow up his Goldberg Variations tour with a single album encompassing all three of Beethoven’s final piano sonatas (Opus 109, 110, and 111). “But the more I worked on them, the more I wondered: Does it really make sense to program them together? Even if it’s almost a rite of passage and countless pianists have done that before me?”
He came to see the trilogy not as a single arc, but as “three absolutely different universes,” each deserving its own context. “Perhaps it would be more interesting to examine what makes those pieces unique rather than what makes them connected,” he reflects. “In my opinion, there are more things that make them unique.”
That line of thinking is emblematic of Ólafsson’s programming philosophy. Here, you can sense his resistance to received wisdom, as well as his drive to reframe even the most hallowed repertoire on his own terms. It’s an approach he pursued on his 2021 album Mozart & Contemporaries, which juxtaposed rarely heard works by Galuppi, Cimarosa, and C.P.E. Bach alongside Mozart to illuminate surprising affinities and departures.
In the case of his April 2026 recital program with Cal Performances, Ólafsson plans to explore what he calls “the road to Opus 109” by tracing the musical and historical lineages that converge in Beethoven’s sonata from 1820. His long-term intention is to do the same for the composer’s last two sonatas as well, shaping a distinct recital program and album around each work, and his highly anticipated new recording, Opus 109—featuring music from this program by Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert—will be released by Deutsche Grammophon on November 21, 2025..
“What is Opus 109? Where is Beethoven coming from with this piece?” he asks. Ólafsson’s quest for answers led to a kind of temporal dialogue that considers Beethoven’s experimentation in the two-movement Op. 90 from 1814 as a vital precursor. Along the way, he makes a case for an overlooked work by Schubert—his Sonata in E minor (D. 566), written in 1817 at age 20—as a direct response to Beethoven’s Op. 90. Though often assumed to be fragmentary—and, when it is performed, sometimes combined with unrelated pieces to round out a conventional four-movement structure—the sonata, Ólafsson believes, is modeled on the older composer’s innovative two-movement design. “To me, it feels like a sister or a brother piece to Beethoven’s,” he says. “There’s nothing unfinished about it.”
And then there is the inevitable presence of Bach. “These three sonatas form the conceptual spine of the program. But both composers are grappling with Bach”—as, in Ólafsson’s view, every great composer must. Opus 109 culminates in one of Beethoven’s most radiant variation movements, which he is convinced shows the inspiration of the Goldberg Variations. As his main examples, he points to the triple-meter rhythmic pattern of the sarabande (originally a dance form) that shapes Bach’s Aria and Beethoven’s theme, the fugal textures and double trills, and the simple but meaningful cyclical return at the end of the journey.
Following his deep immersion in the Goldberg Variations, Ólafsson now has a different understanding of “the presence of Bach in Beethoven’s late works.” He also includes Bach’s monumental Partita No. 6 in E minor on this recital program: “I think it adds something else to the way we hear Beethoven and Schubert, just as I think Beethoven and Schubert add something to Bach as well. You have three different eras meeting there. Some of it is very Classical. Much of it is progressive and Romantic, with what I see—in my fantasy world—as the birth of Schubert in Beethoven’s Op. 90. But the roots all lie in the Baroque period with Bach.”
Collaborative Forces
Beethoven is also on the agenda in the first of Ólafsson’s two orchestral programs at Cal Performances in October. He joins forces with London’s famed Philharmonia Orchestra, currently celebrating its 80th birthday, and conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali, making his Bay Area debut, for the Emperor Piano Concerto No. 5, on a bill that also includes Sibelius’ Symphony No. 5 and the Bay Area premiere of a new work by acclaimed Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz.
While the Emperor, which Beethoven composed amid the onslaught of Napoleon’s occupation of Vienna, is among the most frequently performed piano concertos in the repertoire, Ólafsson approaches it with the same critical questioning he applies to other conventions, such as the habit of presenting the composer’s final three piano sonatas as a unified cycle.
“Very often it’s a good idea, when you see something that’s frequently done, to ask yourself: Are we doing it out of convention, or is this really the best way of presenting it?” he remarks. “It’s not trying to do things differently just for the sake of being different. But the older you are, the more specific you feel about your vision. There are plenty of things in the Emperor that are victims of convention. And there’s nothing conventional about any piece Beethoven ever wrote. He was always going against convention himself. So, we should look for that same spirit.”
He continues: “I’m not saying to make anything up or add anything that’s not there. But, sometimes, the greatest scope for originality and freedom to be yourself can be found in those pieces that are most often performed. It seems like a paradox, but the more they’re performed, the more they suffer the same fate—which is to be approached somewhat automatically.” All the more reason to strive to evoke the fresh vitality of music like the Emperor concerto, “even if it’s been played so many times.”
It’s a task he looks forward to undertaking with the Philharmonia, with whom Ólafsson is collaborating this season as its Featured Artist. He first performed with the storied ensemble in 2016 in Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and fondly recalls a program of Bach and Mozart concertos at the 2021 Proms, “when the world was just opening up again” following the COVID-19 shutdown.
Enhancing the prospect of their partnership is his admiration of Santtu-Matias Rouvali—“one of the most dynamic conductors I’ve ever worked with.” Rouvali’s conducting feels like a natural match: “He’s a man of the moment and anything can happen in concerts with him. Santtu gives you a lot of freedom to do spontaneous things. And his baton technique is beautiful, like a ballet dancer.” Most of all, “Santtu understands the orchestra as well as some of the master composers. He knows how to blend, how to make the orchestra sound colorful and unique.”
That chemistry finds another outlet on these artists’ second program, when Ólafsson turns to Maurice Ravel’s beloved, jazz-tinged Concerto in G major. Also on the program are Sibelius’ stirring tone poem Finlandia—a defiant musical emblem of resistance—and Shostakovich’s politically charged Symphony No. 5. Ravel’s kaleidoscopic colors, mercurial shifts in mood, and crystalline transparency pose a very different kind of challenge from the Emperor. Presented so close together, these two concertos promise to be revealing in how they showcase different facets of Ólafsson’s pianism.
“The Ravel and Beethoven Emperor are both standard repertoire works, but they require completely different types of imagination,” Geffen remarks. “In the Emperor, the balance is equally split between the orchestra and the soloist, if not slightly more on the side of the orchestra. Many passages have the soloist supporting what’s happening in the orchestra, rather than the other way around. Ravel’s Concerto in G is, by contrast, much more a work of chamber music, with super virtuosic parts from soloists in the orchestra as well.” Overall, Geffen characterizes Ólafsson as “the Don Draper of soloists, in the sense that there is something enigmatic about him, something that is unknowable because he’s so put together as a human being. He can calculate what he wants, but he’s also able to be spontaneous and humane—that’s such a difficult balance.”
A Cultural In-Between
“The extraordinary thing about Víkingur is that he has such a wide bandwidth of expressive possibility,” according to John Adams. “His Rameau and Bach and Mozart have incredible delicacy, and at the same time he can make the piano sound huge without banging it.” He adds that he “tried to incorporate that awareness into After the Fall,” a concerto that embeds Ólafsson’s special relationship with Bach into its own musical journey by weaving an improvisation on the C minor Prelude from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier into its final section.
Adams had first become aware of Ólafsson through his recordings, but the pianist was already drawn to the American composer when he was a teenager in Reykjavík. Raised in an artistic household—his mother a piano teacher, his father a composer, architect, and poet passionate about Adams’ music—Ólafsson remembers eagerly listening to the latest recordings of his works. When he later visited Adams at his home in Berkeley, he recognized a deep affinity between his homeland and California.
“I’m not surprised John chose to live in the Bay Area,” he says. “When I think California, I think freedom. It is somehow free from the past, from tradition, from convention. I feel the same back home in Iceland. The good thing about where I come from is that it is part of Europe, but it’s closer to North America. It takes cultural influence from both but stands in between. I’m interested in how ideas can come from different directions and create a unique sense of cohesion.”
This perspective is, for Ólafsson, inseparable from his attraction to composers like Bach, Beethoven, and Adams. Despite the differences in chronology and style, he sees in all three a shared instinct for transformation, for drawing on tradition and reshaping it into new, unprecedented visions. “They don’t just do one thing,” he says. “They stay open to vastly different things. I think that takes real confidence and courage—something we see all too rarely these days in music.”
This sense of being “in between”—between musical eras, geographies, idioms—is central to Ólafsson’s artistic identity. It helps explain his abiding connection to Bach, whose music, he says, distills the legacy of the past “into an incredible arsenal of composition.” Bach, too, remains for him an inexhaustible wellspring of possibility and a “vehicle for new invention” conveying “seeds for the future.” Ólafsson believes that Adams similarly uses Bach to look back over music history and “ponder the truly important question: is there still scope to create? There certainly is.”
Becoming the Music
For Ólafsson, performance should be neither a ritualistic presentation nor a pursuit of novelty, but a state of being, of presence. “When you play music on the piano, you have to become the music.” He compares the process to what happens when an actor takes on a role. “You can always tell who is merely acting the role and who becomes the role. The great actors never just act their role. In the same way, you should never act Beethoven, just putting on ‘the Beethoven show.’ You have to become the music. You become the message of the eternally beautiful song of the slow movement of the Emperor Concerto.”
To Ólafsson, this transcends the model of incessant practice in order to present a particular version of a piece to the audience. “In the greatest performances I’ve experienced, I’ve always felt that the conductor or the singer or the pianist ceases to be performing anything; they just become the material.”
That ideal of transformation carries forward from his recording of the Goldberg Variations and resonates with performers he especially admires from the past: Vladimir Horowitz, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Benno Moiseiwitsch…. “When you listen to Rachmaninoff play Chopin, it’s very much Chopin, but it’s also very much Rachmaninoff. This beautiful meeting place between them is uniquely theirs.”
The result is an approach to authenticity that goes beyond literalistic fidelity—but it is an attitude that has fallen out of favor in the last 60 or 70 years, Ólafsson notes. “The reigning idea has been that you are the humble servant of the score. But if you go to the other side of the score, you understand that musical notation is just the beginning of the beginning. It’s impossible to notate poetry and magic in the moment.”
“Víkingur has the gift of being able to make you rethink your own biases,” says Geffen. “Even those who didn’t agree with his Goldberg Variations respected his approach, because he takes risks.”
Revelation rather than rebellion is the goal. “I love the score and spend a lot of time with it, but you can’t say the score has the truth,” Ólafsson insists. “The truth goes beyond the score. The truth is before the score.”
Leadership support for the 2025–26 Víkingur Ólafsson residency at Cal Performances is provided by Michael P. N. A. Hormel.
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5 Questions with Carol T. Christ and Jeff MacKie-Mason, Co-Chairs of Cal Performances’ Board of Trustees
5 Questions with Carol T. Christ and Jeff MacKie-Mason, Co-Chairs of Cal Performances’ Board of Trustees
Internationally celebrated leaders Christ and MacKie-Mason share their personal memories and lifelong passion for the performing arts.
For the period of July 1, 2025–June 30, 2027, Cal Performances is honored to have Carol T. Christ join Jeff MacKie-Mason as Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees. Having served most recently as Chancellor and University Librarian on the UC Berkeley campus, respectively, their impact extends far beyond the City of Berkeley, or even the realm of academia. Regarded internationally for their leadership in higher education, information and technology, and cultural philanthropy, Christ and MacKie-Mason have also proven themselves unwavering advocates for the performing arts, having both been personally shaped throughout their lives by the power of live performance.
MacKie-Mason has been a member of the Cal Performances Board of Trustees since 2016, and has served as Co-Chair since 2021, helping the organization to navigate changes in leadership, shuttered venues and a return to live performances, and, most recently, the redefinition of Cal Performances’ mission, vision, values, and strategic initiatives. Christ joined the board in 2024 following her retirement from UC Berkeley, though she has attended Cal Performances events since the 1970s and was a critical support to the organization during her time as Chancellor, in which capacity she also approved the organization’s new strategic plan.
Cal Performances is thrilled to have these two celebrated leaders—each with such a rich personal history with Cal Performances and with the arts—in a position to guide the organization over the next two years. Though these two certainly need no introduction, we hope this Q&A will provide a more personal look into their relationship with live performance, as well as their vision for Cal Performances’ exciting next chapter.
What role have the performing arts played in your life (as observer or performer)?
Carol Christ (CC): I’ve played the piano since I was a child, and learned the viola as an adult. I also sang in vocal groups for many years. I’ve been attending performances of arts events of all kinds since college. And Cal Performances has had a profound impact on my family. My stepson Adam Sklute became entranced by the ballet by attending a performance of Swan Lake at Cal Performances when he was five years old. He subsequently had a career as a ballet dancer and is now the artistic director of Ballet West.
Jeff MacKie-Mason (JMM): Music has been vital for me since I was in about first grade. My mom was a good pianist, and inspired me from the start—and got me an excellent piano teacher. In high school, I played third chair cello sitting behind Carter Brey (longtime principal cellist in the NY Phil) and played a lot of 60s and 70s folk tunes on guitar. I drifted for a while, but came back to classical piano with a passion 25 years ago, and have taken lessons and practice daily since. Now that I’m retired, music has become my full-time occupation, including not just many hours at the piano, but classes at UC Berkeley to fill in gaps in my musical education.
Jeff MacKie-Mason by UC Berkeley Libraries
How long have you been attending Cal Performances, and what made you want to serve as co-chair?
CC: I’ve been attending Cal Performances since I arrived in Berkeley in the 1970s. Serving as Co-Chair is a small way of saying thank you for the extraordinary performances I’ve attended over the decades.
JMM: I started attending Cal Performances as soon as we arrived to Berkeley in 2015, and joined the Board in 2016. When Jeremy Geffen [Executive and Artistic Director] asked me to become Co-Chair, I gratefully accepted the honor so that I could provide greater service to this magnificent organization—and also so I could work more closely with Jeremy, who is an incredible leader.
What is one (or a few, if you must!) of the most memorable performances you have seen in our halls, and what made it so special?
CC: There have been so many; I remember hearing Luciano Pavarotti sing at the Greek Theatre; I remember the Juilliard Quartet performing the whole cycle of Beethoven’s string quartets. But perhaps my most outstanding memory was a remarkable recital by a young, relatively unknown soprano, Jessye Norman. There were so few people in attendance that the recital was moved from Zellerbach Hall to Hertz Hall, where we heard one of the great voices of the century.
JMM: I was deeply moved by Víkingur Ólafsson’s performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. That’s one of my absolute favorite pieces in the literature, so I’ve listened to a lot of live and recorded performances (and it’s on my bucket list to learn). Víkingur brought a clarity and emotional intelligence that I’d never heard before: it has inspired me anew when I play Bach. Though recorded, I was also transported by Mitsuko Ucihda’s Schubert Impromptus, and by Jeremy Denk’s playing Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier during our online COVID season. And too many others for a short answer!
Carol Christ
Having served in a key leadership role on the UC Berkeley campus, what do you feel is the importance and opportunity of Cal Performances being part of the university?
CC: Art provides a kind of insight into human experience unlike any other; it is perhaps the most moving and profound form of human knowledge and achievement. And art builds community. I learned to love the performing arts in college; we are giving students that opportunity.
JMM: UC Berkeley is one of the very best liberal arts, comprehensive, research universities in the world. We graduate about 15,000 students a year, who go on to make a meaningful difference throughout the world. Crucial to our educational prowess is precisely that we are a comprehensive, liberal arts institution: our students are exposed to great thinkers, creators, and performers across the whole range of sciences, humanities, and arts. Cal Performances plays a critical role for them during these formative years. Berkeley just wouldn’t be the same without it!
What are you most excited about for Cal Performances’ future?
CC: Under Jeremy Geffen’s leadership, the quality of the seasons has been extraordinary. I look forward to even more great performances.
JMM: Over the past two years, we have developed and launched a strong and very concrete strategic plan. With it, we’ve charted a course forward that will result in Cal Performances not only surviving these difficult times for the performing arts, but becoming stronger. We’ll see innovative programming, increased engagement with campus and K–12 students, support for emerging artists… I’m very excited to be part of this ambitious, and—forgive the over-used word, but—truly transformative forward-looking project.
Carol T. Christ served as UC Berkeley’s 11th chancellor from 2017 through 2024. A celebrated scholar of Victorian literature, she is also known as an advocate for high-caliber, accessible public higher education, and a champion of women’s issues and diversity on college campuses. As chancellor, she worked to foster community, improve the campus climate for people of all backgrounds, celebrate the institution’s long-standing commitment to free speech, strengthen UC Berkeley’s financial position, address a housing shortage, and develop a ten-year strategic plan for the campus. Prior to serving as Chancellor of UC Berkeley, Christ was the 10th President of Smith College from 2002 until 2017. In 1970, Christ joined the English faculty at UC Berkeley. As Chair of the department from 1985 to 1988, she built and maintained one of the top-ranked English departments in the country. Christ entered UC Berkeley’s administration in 1988, serving first as dean of the Division of Humanities and later as provost and dean of the College of Letters and Science. In 1994, she was appointed vice chancellor and provost and later became executive vice chancellor. During her six years as Berkeley’s top academic officer, she was credited with sharpening the institution’s intellectual focus and building top-rated departments in the humanities and sciences.
Christ also chairs the boards of the Central European University and the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath) and serves on the boards of the Marlboro Music School and Festival, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and Rutgers University.
Jeffrey MacKie-Mason is UC Berkeley’s University Librarian Emeritus, and Professor Emeritus of Information and Economics. In June 2024, Jeff MacKie-Mason retired from his positions as University Librarian and Chief Digital Scholarship Officer, Professor in the School of Information, and Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley and received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Service Award. MacKie-Mason came to Berkeley after 29 years on the faculty of the University of Michigan, where he served as Dean of the School of Information 2010–2015. He received the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award from Michigan in 2010. During his time at the helm at the Berkeley Library, he was a leader in the UC drive to flip the scholarly publishing industry to open access, co-chairing the systemwide publisher negotiation team 2018–2024. He also led the successful $150 million fundraising campaign for the Library. MacKie-Mason earned his PhD in economics from MIT. He has been a pioneering scholar in the economics of the Internet, online behavior, and digital information creation and distribution. His more than 85 scientific publications appear in scholarly journals in the areas of economics, computer science, law, public policy, and information and library science.
MacKie-Mason is a concert pianist with a life-long love of the arts, and has served on the boards of the University Musical Society at the University of Michigan and the Kerrytown Concert House. In addition to his leadership of Cal Performances’ Board of Trustees he also currently serves on the board of Authors Alliance, which advances the interests of authors choosing to share their creations broadly in order to serve the public good.
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Jeremy Geffen Introduces the 2025–26 Season
Jeremy Geffen Introduces the 2025–26 Season
A Letter from Executive and Artistic Director, Jeremy Geffen
By Jeremy Geffen, Executive and Artistic Director of Cal Performances
Welcome to Cal Performances’ 2025–26 season, the Bay Area’s most wide-ranging selection of music, dance, and theater. This season, we’re thrilled to bring you more than 80 events featuring some of the world’s most acclaimed performers—a reflection of the adventurous spirit that Berkeley audiences are famous for.
Our ambitious Illuminations theme of “Exile & Sanctuary” focuses on how issues of displacement can inform bold new explorations of identity and community; how profound distillations of these complex movements can be found in the creative works that originate in their wakes; and how artistic expression can offer safe harbor during times of unrest or upheaval—an idea I hope will ring true for each performance you experience this season.
Of the seven distinct Illuminations programs in our new season, I’d like to draw particular attention to Sarabande Africaine, a thrilling collaboration between superstars Angélique Kidjo and Yo-Yo Ma that explores the intersections between African and European music traditions, to be performed at the Greek Theatre on our season’s opening weekend.
We also welcome the return of Víkingur Ólafsson as our 2025–26 Artist in Residence. This masterful and ever-insightful pianist appears this fall as soloist in two concerts with London’s extraordinary Philharmonia Orchestra under the baton of principal conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali, and returns to our stage for a solo recital in the spring.
Our acclaimed dance series is distinguished by genre-defining artists and major new productions, including the renowned Paris Opera Ballet, making its Cal Performances debut in the North American premiere of a new work by boundary-breaking choreographer Hofesh Shechter; the legendary Martha Graham Dance Company celebrating its centennial; The Joffrey Ballet in an ecstatic and otherworldly celebration of the traditional Scandinavian summer solstice festival; and the long-awaited Cal Performances debut of A.I.M by Kyle Abraham.
All of this, and so much more! As you explore our season calendar, I hope you discover events that offer fresh perspectives, challenge and reward your spirit, and bring you joy. I look forward to seeing you in the audience!