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/Blue Bottle challenges how we listen, look, and remember.	Video Preview
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).	Artist Interviews  Campanella on Going Analog   Audio Excerpts Red Fly     Exploded  Artist Statement  Biography
"Campanella…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." —Jerry Portwood, Backstage
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.

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.