Colgate University hosted Francesca Zambello ’78, the inaugural Clifford family innovator-in-residence, on campus during the week of Monday, Feb. 24 through Friday, Feb. 28.
Zambello joined the Colgate community along with three other professionals in her creative team, composer Christopher Tin, choreographer Jessica Lang and librettist and dramaturg Kelley Rourke. Throughout the week, the creative team taught classes in their respective areas of expertise — for instance, Christopher Tin, a Grammy-winning composer, worked with students in Colgate’s first-ever gaming music class.
Zambello, a Colgate alumna and current artistic director of the Washington National Opera, explained how the residence was possible by acknowledging the Clifford family’s donation and her chance encounter with President Brian W. Casey at an airport.
“I was on a flight landing in Washington, and so was he, and we ran into each other in the airport,” Zambello said. “We always email each other and say we have to get together. Even though we’re less than an hour apart, it just doesn’t happen. We were talking in the car, and he had told me that he had just gotten this generous gift, and he said ‘maybe it’s something you’d be interested in.’ I said ‘let me think about it, and I’m very interested, but I think it can’t just be me.’ I’m really a theater person, and it’s not something you can do by yourself.”
Zambello’s emphasis on the importance of others to make the residency possible was shown by the very talented performers. These performers featured in the production include pianist Tongyao Li; opera singers Michelle Mariposa, Nicholas Huff and Winona Martin; classical dancers Eve Jacobs, Milan Misko and Rachel Secrest and two Colgate student dancers, first-years Josie Chase and Summer Davies.
In addition to the artists on the creative team workshopping the show and teaching classes, the residency included events on campus such as a panel discussing the opera-ballet on Wednesday, Feb. 26. The panel introduced the premise of the show to the wider Colgate community.
According to Zambello, “Kiss the Sky” sets out to be an innovative opera-ballet that challenges conventional operas by fusing it with ballet.
“Our goal for this week was figuring out how we’re trying to tell the story between dance and music and how we tell the story. Every theater piece is about a story. A story is the most important thing,” Zambello said.
The story itself is about the interconnectedness of the lives of famous painter Georgia O’Keeffe, socialite and patron of the arts Mabel Luhan Dodge and Alfred Stieglitz, O’Keeffe’s husband and photographer. Zambello particularly highlighted how this story is one about the friendship between O’Keeffe and Dodge, standing out against the oversaturation of male friendships in stories.
“There’s lots of novels and plays about friendship between two men, and I don’t think there are as many about the friendship between two women, and that was part of the inspiration for this was to show how these two women as artists nurtured each other,” Zambello said.
Nicholas Huff, the tenor voicing the part of Stieglitz, commented on his contribution to the production.
“A lot of tenor roles in the opera canon are very heroic or very romantic or both,” Huff said. “And so it’s a lot of swooning and dashing across the stage to dip the soprano or whomever. In this one, it is a romantic role, but there is such a big age gap between my character Alfred and Georgia that it’s not a simple romantic relationship. I myself am not that old; I’m only 32. He was in his sixties by the time their relationship came to fruition. It’s a complicated story and that’s something I’m trying to show — not just that it’s big singing and high notes but also character acting.”
Christian DuComb, associate professor of theater and associate dean of the faculty for faculty recruitment and development, was the faculty coordinator of the residency. He shared his thoughts on the importance of telling this story in such a way that it illuminates more about the three artists than history storytelling has condensed about their lives.
“I knew a little bit about Georgia O’Keeffe. I mean, she’s a well known American painter, but as Francesca [Zambello] and Kelley [Rourke] were saying [at the panel discussion], most people know her for her flower paintings,” DuComb said. “They don’t know a whole lot about her biography or her other challenging or more abstract work. I’ve certainly learned quite a bit to be a fly on the wall for this project.”
Huff agreed with the project’s potential to showcase a more complete story of O’Keeffe as important.
“We’re going to get to share this story when otherwise normally it may not actually show up for people,” Huff said. “And also Georgia O’Keeffe is just an important, special, particularly queer woman from history. And those are stories that we can bring out, and why should we not.”
DuComb further commented on the importance of collaboration in bringing to light the complexity of the story.
“We often think about innovation as the individual genius working on her own or his own, but innovation often springs from collaboration, and I think that the students and faculty know that from the classroom,” DuComb said. “We learn best when we’re learning together, but I think to model that in the Innovator-in-Residence program where it isn’t just about one person, but it’s about what a group of people can do when they all bring their talents and strengths together. It’s a really nice way to begin this new program.”
In many ways the collaboration among all of the artists involved reflects the people whose stories they are trying to tell. On Feb. 28, there were two performances of the residency’s showcase in Bernstein Hall of scenes that the team had crafted as a culmination of their time at Colgate. In those scenes, it was visible how all of the moving parts of this process fit together as pieces of a puzzle.
At the end of the showcase, the creatives invited the audience to share their thoughts and reactions for consideration of the project’s further development. Even though they are still developing this project, the current nuanced pairings of the dancers with the singers showed the complex entanglement of parts of the human soul.
When reflecting on the opportunity of her residence, Zambello highlighted the importance of seizing opportunities and taking chances.
“I always tell people sometimes the best things in life happen serendipitously,” Zambello said.
This serendipity trickled into the involvement of first-year Summer Davies as an additional dancer in the showcase performance.
“On [a] Monday afternoon with Josie [Chase], another Colgate dancer and close friend of mine, we walked into the studio not knowing what to expect,” Davies said. “We met the entire production team at once, which was very intimidating. It was Zambello who suggested that [Chase] and I should be part of it since we were going to be there shadowing, and she needed some more dancers for the beginning of ‘Kiss the Sky’.”
Davies further shared her thoughts on participating in the unique creative process.
“From the moment I stepped into the studio, I felt like I became one of the family with the creative team,” Davies said. “Although it was only a week, I know I am going to miss all of those talented individuals.”
The program for the showcase included a QR code of a “Text Excerpt of the Librettos.” The QR code directs to a page on Kelley Rourke’s website with the lyrics from “Introduction: The Time Has Come,” one of the scenes featured in the showcase. In addition to Zambello’s comment on serendipity, the piece’s lyrics send the message of capitalizing on dreams as young artists in collaborative ways.
“All great work is born of love / be it made by hand / or machine,” the introduction reads. “291 Fifth Avenue / is a gallery for new ideas, / an antidote to convention, / a home for the new man, / a respite for the weary, / an oasis of freedom, / an isle of independence.”
