COMPOSER AND DIRECTOR

     In Red Flag of the Future, we experience the story of a woman who bravely calls for a universal strike to protest unfairness. She encounters a nameless adversary who seems to share the same goal, but does not share her sense of humanity. The woman is ultimately imprisoned and executed. Her protests, more than a hundred years later, feel fresh and relevant. They are protests against exploitation of workers, empty capitalism, and endless wars.

     The music, based on the beautiful translation by Laura Schlachtmeyer, was written as chromatic melodies based on the natural English language. I wrote this opera for piano, double-bass, percussion, synthesizers, drum machine, and voices. The score was recorded, voices and instruments, using a portable recording setup in apartments and houses in upstate New York, Jersey City, and Washington DC. 

     Puppets and dancers were filmed as they listened to the vocal score and enacted the scenes. The odd-numbered scenes were performed with dancers, directed by Natália Gleason-Nagy, which we shot in the Anacostia Arts Center in DC. 

     We shot each puppet scene in two parts. The puppet stage, designed and constructed by Jarrod DiGiorgi, has a built-in monitor screen in the upstage area. This allowed us to display prerecorded video as well as live video, while the puppet action took place on the stage. Preshoots of the puppet scenes were completed in a basement owned by the Hoboken Public Library and in a former polka venue outside of Allentown, PA.

     In our moment today, Red Flag of the Future resonates because it asks a crucial question: How can we destroy autocracy while preserving our humanity, and create a new world that leaves no one behind?

PUPPET ARTIST

     If I recall correctly, all Laura asked was if I wanted to make insect puppets. “Who wouldn’t!” I replied.

     That was pretty much the end of any design direction. It was a glorious experience.

     Originally conceived as a few small insect-like creatures for Red Flag of the Future's dream sequences, this little puppet project grew in scope over two years, eventually eclipsing everything else. In total I created twenty puppets (well, nineteen and a streetlamp). I was inspired by John Tenniel’s illustrations of the Looking-Glass Insects - specifically the Snap-dragon-fly and the Bread-and-butter-fly - in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking

Glass. But rather than foodstuffs, I decided the insects in Red Flag of the Future evolved from refuse. 

     Therefore, all the puppets are constructed of a combination of waste, recyclables, and surplus material. To begin, I piled objects such as empty plastic deli containers and aluminum beverage cans on top of each other to see how their shapes would interact, taping them for stability before adding details like legs and antennae. I had a rough idea of what each character would look like after reading the script, but refined my designs to better reflect the spirit of each after hearing the vocal tracks. The character of The Guide changed the most significantly, becoming squatter and more deformed to better fit the stylings of the voice actor. The details of each puppet give some indication of its character’s status within society, and give a nod to the period in which the original play was written. They're embellished with little more than masking tape and paint, the idea being the insects would have been able to add that themselves.

     Let me be clear, I am a visual artist, NOT a puppeteer, therefore I devised some creative solutions to compensate. The faces are deliberately featureless, so LED lights in part of each puppet illuminate to indicate when it is speaking or singing. The director requested the puppets be operated from above, so a system of dowel rods and plastic connectors attaches to a bracket on the back of each puppet, allowing for overhead operation by the puppeteers. I’d be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to thank our lead puppeteer Ben for his incredible skill in bringing my creations to life, regardless of these design foibles.

LEAD PUPPETEER

     When you are a puppeteer, it's always important to spend time working with the puppets before the cameras start rolling. Not only is this vital for figuring out how the puppets look and move best on film, but it also gives crucial time to determine the safest ways for the puppeteers themselves to move around. By nature it's an artform that's performed in tight spaces, so determining a functional position makes the puppeteers' performances that much stronger.

     Probably the most important advice I shared with my puppeteers was to keep the puppets moving and reacting even if they weren't a featured speaker, which gave them the freedom to experiment and make conscious acting choices. An easy mistake is to treat the puppet solely as a prop, when they really occupy an odd middle ground between actor and prop. They should be operated from an actor's mindset, making choices to create the illusion of independent life, but their fabricated nature means they can be physically and visually expressive in nonhuman ways. 

     This makes puppets uniquely suited to this project's German Expressionism aesthetic, an art form where sets and props are already visually heightened to reflect the emotions and themes of the text. You can contort an actor's features or warp your sets to portray the ideas of this art style, but a puppet can be Expressionism fully realized.

 STAGE DIRECTOR

     Laura is my long-time collaborator and we share an interest in translation in theatre, so Red Flag of the Future was a great project to unite on. As a director, I am interested in exploring how to support new opera, so being invited into Andrew’s world was meaningful to me. In many ways, the process has been one of a kind. My quest was to serve an existing vision and help realize that with the cast. 

     In our first moments together, I worked with the cast to establish a shared physical vocabulary and understanding of the space. I wanted to clearly place Woman in the middle of the stage. Over the course of her scenes, the significance of this placement changes. At first, the central point places her in a position of power. By the end, it confines and imprisons her. 

     Each character joins her in the center as they interact. Throughout, the ensemble works as a sort of chorus, continually and actively surrounding Woman and contributing their movements to the main action.

     In keeping with the stylized approach, only a few items were used to define each character - a hat, a necklace, a suggestion of protest signs or riot shields. We worked to maintain a supply of movement and stillness, isolation and interaction, so that cinematography and editing could give the work its final shape.