"...lyrical monologues, otherworldly videos and an ingeniously eerie set...Red Fly/Blue Bottle is a purposefully elusive work, a poetic meditation..." -Jason Zinoman

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"sweetly strange...a complete, unique universe" -Alexis Solowski

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"Red Fly/Blue Bottle: Genre-Buster...an intriguing, richly layered work of music-theater that resists categorization..." -Susan Youn,

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 "Eye candy, fantastically creepy music, and an expert dash of steampunk fill the stage in this deliciously haunting concert..." - Jax

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by CHRISTINA CAMPANELLA (music)
& STEPHANIE FLEISCHMANN (words)

A clock explodes. A man departs for destinations unknown. Hypnotic songs fill up an empty house as a lone woman peers through her microscope.

A theatrical event that bridges concert, cabinet of curiosities, and video installation, Red Fly challenges how we listen, look, and remember

Video Excerpt

Artist Interviews

 Campanella on
 Composing Analog

Audio Excerpts

Red Fly

 

 

Exploded

photo: Ryan Jensen

and

Aided by an elderly entomologist and a young doppelganger straight out of silent film, composer/performer Christina Campanella spins a sonic web that traces a young woman's discovery of her companion's deployment to a secret war and the steps she takes to make sense of his absence.

Staged as a concert that unfolds within a densely layered video installation, this innovative new work delivers a rich aural and visual experience. Here, the familiar is made strange: Tightly crafted songs emerge from an evocative terrain of found sounds, ticking clocks, and analog tone generators. Miniature noir films are projected onto floating surfaces and live and pre-made video animates still objects. Red Fly/Blue Bottle explores the mediating effects of memory and how we use the power of our imagination to surmount that which we have lost.

Directed by Mallory Catlett (Oh What War), interwoven with video imagery by Peter Norrman and Mirit Tal, Red Fly/Blue Bottle is designed by Jim Findlay (set), Miranda Hardy (lights) and Olivera Gajic (costumes) and Jeremy Wilson (live sound) to conjure an associative visual landscape in which objects open up in unexpected ways, revealing worlds within worlds.

With: Black-Eyed Susan (Ridiculous Theater), Jesse Hawley (NTUSA), singer song-writer Chris Lee, and Sam Baker (drums) and Erich Shoen-Rene (cello).

Red Fly/Blue Bottle is being presented through the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP), which provides development, commissions and full production support.

Made possible by funding from the New York State Music Fund; the NYSCA Individual Artist program; Greenwall Foundation; the American Music Center's Composer Assistance Program; Meet the Composer, a program of MetLife Creative Connections; and residencies from the Gertrude Stein Repertory's Digital Performance Institute; Swing Space, a program of LMCC, generously supported by the September 11th Fund; and Chashama. Additional development support from The Chocolate Factory.

Tinder, 30 minutes extracted from Red Fly/Blue Bottle, will preview at the Exit Festival in Creteil, France, in March 2009.