Red Fly/Blue Bottle
Christina Campanella (music & sound) and Stephanie Fleischmann (words)
“…moody, driving music…lyrical monologues, otherworldly videos and an ingeniously eerie set…a purposefully elusive work, a poetic meditation…”
—The New York Times
Mallory Catlett (direction), Peter Norrman (video), Mirit Tal (live video), Miranda Hardy (lights), Jim Findlay (set), Olivera Gajic (costumes), Jeremy Wilson (sound)
Performed by Jesse Hawley (Clarissa), Chris Lee (the Man), Black-Eyed Susan (Old Lady), Christina Campanella (the Operator, accordion, organ, toy piano), Sam Baker (drums, bass, guitar, ukulele), Erich Schoen-René (cello)
Created by Latitude 14.
2010 - Experimental Media Performing Arts Complex (EMPAC), Troy, NY
2009 - Noorderzon Festival, Groningen, NL
2009 - HERE Arts Center, New York, NY (premiere)
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.
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, Red Fly/Blue Bottle conjures an associative visual landscape in which objects open up in unexpected ways, revealing worlds within worlds. 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; 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.