A MARVELOUS ORDER: ​​​​​​​an opera about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs

A MARVELOUS ORDER:
an opera about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs

This is a video includes footage recorded at a private workshop presentation of our work-in-progress held on May 12, 2015. A MARVELOUS ORDER The opera about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs www.mosesjacobsopera.com Music by Judd Greenstein Libretto by Tracy K. Smith Choreography by Will Rawls Directed by Joshua Frankel Produced by New Amsterdam Presents & 3-Legged Dog For more information about the producers, please visit www.newampresents.org or www.3ldnyc.org Music Director - David Bloom Featuring NOW Ensemble Performance by - Christopher Dylan Herbert, Megan Schubert, Rinde Eckert, Eliza Bagg, Lucy Dhegrae, Tomas Cruz, Jonathan Woody, Martia Abril, Marisa Clementi, Ashley Handel, John Hoobyar, Sarah Lifson, Lindsey Reuter, Paul Singh, Aryeh Blumenfeld, Izabella Gozzo Animation by Joshua Frankel Technology Developed by Fubbi Karlsson & Seth Kirby Set Design by David Ogle Costume Design by Andrea Lauer Lighting Design by Dan Jobbins Video Design by Philip Gulley & Fubbi Karlsson Assistant Choreographer - Kristopher Pourzal Costume Assistant - Katherine Anick, Maria Ozmen Assistant Animators - Grace Chung, Weerapan Dancharoenwanakit, Luba Drozd, Lily Fang, Tal Gliks, Pete Hamilton, Sarah Ver Hoeve, Joshua Merck, Sarah Orenstein, Adam Yost Stage Manager - Megan Schwarz Dickert Production Manager - Santino Lo Sound Engineer - Aaron Roche Technical Director - Matt Carrington This project was supported in part by Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Program, with a grant from The Rockefeller Foundation. This workshop of the Untitled Opera about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. This workshop of the Untitled Opera about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs was developed as part of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Process Space program. LMCC.net

"One of the best matches of visuals to music I’ve seen." -- Anne Midgette, Washington Post "Gorgeous." -- Alex Ross, New Yorker critic, in his blog The Rest Is Noise This project is growing into an opera: http://mosesjacobsopera.com More info on the director: http://www.joshuafrankel.net/Plan_Of_The_City.html https://twitter.com/#!/frankelfrankel More info on the music: http://www.nowensemble.com Making-of photos on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Plan-Of-The-City/170279963031275 A new film combing animation with live action conceived and directed by Joshua Frankel, about the architecture of New York City blasting off into outer space and resettling on Mars. The film’s visuals are an animated collage combining live action footage, animated elements, illustrations and treated photographs, including photos taken by the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity made available to the public domain by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Plan of the City was created in collaboration with composer Judd Greenstein and NOW Ensemble, an acclaimed "indie classical" chamber ensemble; the ensemble, including Greenstein, feature prominently in the film as live actors set inside the animated framework. The audio of the film consists solely of Greenstein's Change, performed by NOW Ensemble; Change and Plan of the City were created in parallel, each expressing its own artistic intention while simultaneously serving its "sibling". The film was presented with the music performed live, timed to the film, at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City in May, 2011. It also exists as its own stand-alone entity, utilizing NOW Ensemble's recent studio recording of Change(out on New Amsterdam Records). Director: Joshua Frankel Music: “Change”, composed by Judd Greenstein and performed by NOW Ensemble Cast: Sara Budde, Patrick Burke, Logan Coale, Mark Dancigers, Judd Greenstein, Michael Mizrahi, Alexandra Sopp, Susie Simpson, Celia Au, Jonthan Chang, Dan Chen, William Lex Ham, Ting Hu, Tammi Lee, Doua Moua, Rachel Shapira Producer: Elissa Federoff DP: Clayton Combe Choreographer: Will Rawls AD: Rachel Horlick Key Grip: Christopher Fisher Gaffer: Justyn Davis Props: Eve Biddle Script Supervisor: George Westberg Stylist: Jenni Shaw Asst Stylist: Julianne Laney Casting Lauren Charkow PAs: Clark Frankel, Daisuke Kasagawa, John Kitsis Edited by: Joshua Frankel and George Westberg Greenscreen Keying and Rotoscoping: Spline VFX VFX Supervisor: Leslie Chung Tools Development: Clay Budin, Dan Fast Digital Artists: Dave C Frankel, Carolyn Frisch, Rio Harrington, Minwoo Lee, Suzanne Porush, Hyun Jung Ra, David Sarma, Adam Yost Studio and Invaluable Support provided by My Active Driveway Images of Mars Courtesy of NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory - Caltech Made possible with a generous grant from New York State Council On The Arts

This is a story about New York City, and about cities, in general. It's a story about the people who live in those cities and how the decisions made on their behalf, by those with authority and those who resist that authority, tangibly impact their lives. It's a story about two brilliant, visionary urban theorists, each of whom turned their theory into practice, and in so doing changed the landscape of New York and the field of urbanism forever. And it's a story that continues to this day, in New York City and beyond. 

This multi-media and multi-disciplinary opera, co-produced with 3-Legged Dog Media and Theater Group, is by New Amsterdam co-founder and composer Judd Greenstein, director Joshua Frankel, choreographer Will Rawls and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith. Our version of this story is told through the lens of the struggle between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses over the fate of Washington Square Park and lower Manhattan in the 1960s. When Jacobs's neighborhood was threatened by Moses's highway development plans, she mounted community opposition that successfully halted Moses's actions and weakened his hold on urban policy. That moment of conflict represents the juncture between two approaches to urban planning, personified by the two antagonists, that continue to frame the contemporary development of cities around the world. 

Robert Moses was the most powerful urban planner of the modern era, an unelected official who carved out an untouchable, autocratic fiefdom that he maintained for four decades, financed through tolls collected on roads and bridges he constructed and ruled from an island fortress in the heart of New York. In the interest of creating his vision of utopia, and with the rare means to carry out such a vision, Moses thoroughly transformed the landscape of New York, dismissing local opposition and destroying neighborhoods in order to build the highways, bridges, and tunnels that opened New York to the automobile age, as well as a vast system of parks, beaches, pools and public housing on a scale unprecedented in modern history. 

Jane Jacobs was a journalist and one of history's great autodidacts, upending the field of urban planning and the sociology of cities through writings that were wholly the product of her own studies and experience. From her keen observations of the city she inhabited, she formed a revolutionary understanding of how cities function, and proposed a new approach to urban planning that used this understanding to promote the kinds of behaviors that make cities prosper and thrive. She was dismissive of paternalistic approaches to planning, based on faulty, fanciful assumptions about the needs of urban populations, which she identified as doing more harm than good.