"Campanella as Old Lady begins by reciting lines into a microphone, like a neo–Emily Dickinson, narrating a story… that is at times poignant… always beautiful. The world evoked is complex and dreamy and… compelling while also evoking an ephemeral landscape of peculiar fantasies made palpable and menacingly real." — Backstage

Within an environment that is part sound studio/part abandoned house, performer/composer Christina Campanella makes her composition: Aided by an elderly entomologist (Black-Eyed Susan) and a young doppelganger straight out of silent film (Jesse Hawley) the composer, who serves as the frame for this multimedia music-theater work, retraces the deployment of her former companion to an unknown war.

Directed by Mallory Catlett, interwoven with layered video imagery by Peter Norrman and Mirit Tal, Red Fly/Blue Bottle explores the condition of absence experienced by those who remain at home in times of war.

Staged as a concert within a video installation environment created by Marsha Ginsberg, Red Fly/Blue Bottle conjures an associative visual landscape in which objects open up in unexpected ways, unfolding to reveal worlds within worlds. Permeated by loss, the familiar is made strange: Voices emanate from the mouths of jars, clocks explode, flies whisper, oscillators serve as portals to the past. Tightly crafted hypnotic songs (alternative and down-tempo dream-pop) emerge from an evocative multi-channel sonic terrain of found sounds, ticking clocks and analog tone generators; miniature noir films are projected onto floating surfaces, and live and premade video animates earthbound objects. Juxtaposed, these sounds and images create a dense terrain of sonic and visual echoes whose reverberations amplify the conundrum at the core of the piece:

Using the technology of audio/visual documentation as a metaphor for the human memory, this work asks, Is remembering a way to process loss or prolong it? How does the mind, besieged by absence, distort and rearrange reality?

The three women at the center of Red Fly/Blue Bottle serve as manifestations of different stages of grief brought about by the war—the urgency of the immediate moment; the inability to let go; the point of having moved beyond it all—each vying for her own version of the story. As she “makes” the piece, the composer loses control of the narrative, making harrowing discoveries in the process.

Combining the communal nature of performance with the intimacy of listening to records alone through headphones, Red Fly/Blue Bottle explores what it means to live in a culture that acts as if it is not at war.

Red Fly Blue Bottle has received funding from the New York State Music Fund, Meet the Composer, and the NYSCA Individual Artists program (for video artist Peter Norrman and writer Stephanie Fleischmann), and residencies at Gertrude Stein Repertory’s Digital Performance Institute and Chashama, and development support from The Chocolate Factory, Long Island City (Fresh Meat Festival).

 

MORE INFO: www.redflybluebottle.com 

Red Fly/Blue Bottle is our attempt to address the ineffable—events occurring in our world that are challenging for us to articulate using the languages readily available to us. In this context, working with visual artists who think differently from us, seeking to meld our respective disciplines, to create a fully integrated performative world through multiple media in which the spoken word is only one stream of information, makes perfect sense.

On the one hand, Red Fly is a song cycle. On the other, it is a multimedia music theater work. And on yet another, it is visual art, made in response to music, that contains somewhere within it a narrative. How does an audience come to this sort of work? Our hope is that that we do not impose meaning, but allow an audience to position themselves in relation to this multilayered landscape wherever they see or feel a point of entry, coming to and moving through it on their own terms.

from CHRISTINA CAMPANELLA

I create musical compositions with multitrack recording and audio technology as a means of exploring the interaction of live presence with electronic reproduction, using found sounds to create a narrative language. My scores combine live vocalists and electroacoustic instruments with a recorded soundscape of orchestrated samples. I compose with found sounds for their associative qualities—the feel of the recordings they’re taken from, their literal identity—musically arranged to enhance a narrative. Equally important as my choice of sounds and their placement, is how I manipulate them with audio filters and processing. I electronically treat particular frequencies and waveforms to modulate how the listener perceives them. This alters their psychological resonance, opening up alternate points of reference and paths of experience. Beneath layers of feedback, sampled car alarms and space telemetry, my music contrasts a romantic sensibility with a cool, musically dissonant approach, giving it just enough room to echo deeply.

from STEPHANIE FLEISCHMANN

I am interested in telling stories in different ways—in how the layering and fragmenting of narrative and language can tap an emotional core. Blueprints for intricate 3-D sonic and visual worlds, my plays often move beyond the page to nontraditional music-theater and installation. Highly visual as well as language-based, my writing mines: a theater of images, the spectacle in a story; the emotional resonance and narrative space implicit in sound.

Red Fly/Blue Bottle is, ultimately, about what happens when a young woman speaks out. How this story is told—how the text bumps up against and integrates with the video/sound/physical objects—allows me a strange and wonderful freedom to push boundaries, to explore the limits of text for the stage. The question driving the process is where and how the disciplines merge—which medium needs to tell what and when. A simple physical gesture or a video image is often far more visceral and to-the-point than words.

Christina Campanella (a performer/composer who “sings songs in siren style”, NY Times) combines sounds from crackly LPs, vintage drum machines, radio waves, and household objects, with original electro-acoustic music to create theatrical soundscapes and deconstructed art songs.

An alumnus of New Dramatists and a core-member of the Playwrights Center, Stephanie Fleischmann is a playwright and librettist/lyricist, a maker of texts that serve as blueprints for intricate three-dimensional sonic and visual worlds.

Mallory Catlett (director) is a freelance director/dramaturg whose work has been seen at The Ontological, PS122, the Collapsable Hole, HERE, the Culture Project, NY Theatre Workshop, the Public, Women’s Interart, Chashama, and the Dublin Fringe.

An award-wining video designer and media artist, Peter Norrman has collaborated with The Builder’s Association, 3-legged Dog, Coco Fusco, and David Byrne, among others. He has been commissioned by the Cultural Capital of Europe to make a new video installation.

Mirit Tal is a media artist and software engineer who works with 31 Down and has designed video for Joanne Akalaitis’ Beckett One Acts with Mikhail Baryshnikov at New York Theater Workshop.