A Marvelous Order is an opera about the battle between two visionaries, Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, over the fate of NYC in the 1960s.

I directed this work—and created multi-channel animation that runs throughout.

Animation traditionally occupies a secondary role in the performing arts, serving the needs of the primary art form (eg music or dance) through design. We up-end this hierarchy with A Marvelous Order, positioning animation as “the art” itself—on equal footing with the work’s poetry and music. Animation is worthy of such a position: it can speak directly to our emotions through color, form and rhythm in ways that evoke the power of music. And it can deploy representational imagery poetically.

Selected Press—
Wall Street Journal (review), New York Times, New Yorker, WNYC On The Media, Urban Omnibus, Forward

A Marvelous Order has been developed through a series of work-in-progress excerpt presentations and site-specific adaptations, each followed by a phase of creative conversation and iteration, leading up to the world premiere and forthcoming tour. Each presentation is a work unto itself. A Marvelous Order has become not only an an opera but a body of work organized around a journey of creation.

Images from and information about selected performances—
World Premiere at the Center for Performing Arts at Penn State
Brooklyn Public Library
River To River Festival
Times Square Midnight Moment
Williamstown
National Sawdust

Artworks—
Cyanotypes at the Palmer Museum
Additional works on paper
Film Stills and GIFs

Further information and images—
Education Program
Statement
Credits

The project also has its own website here.

Support—
This work has been supported by Sundance, The Rockefeller Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, the Robert Goelet Foundation and the Graham Foundation, as well as numerous visionary individual patrons of the arts.

This project was incubated at residencies hosted by the Center for Performing Arts at Penn State, the Sundance New Frontier Story Lab, 3-Legged Dog, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Wassaic Project.

World Premiere
2022

A Marvelous Order premiered at the Center for the Performing Arts (CPA) at Penn State—the culmination of a multi-year partnership, including three creative development residencies over four years.

This was the first performance of the completed work.

In addition to providing leadership production support, each of these residencies included deep engagement with students, faculty and the surrounding community, examining this story and how it's themes are playing out today in cities and towns around the world. State College, PA—like many places in America—is in the midst of an affordable housing crisis, which became a focus of our discussions. We plan to create similar conversations wherever A Marvelous Order is performed.

Selected Press:
· Review of the world premiere by opera critic and historian Heidi Waleson in the Wall Street Journal
· A deep-dive into our partnership with the CPA by music writer Natalie Wiener in the PennStater.

Brooklyn Public Library
2021

Excerpts of A Marvelous Order were presented by the Brooklyn Public Library, outdoors, in the plaza in front of the Central Library. Animation from the opera was projected onto the building’s wondrous facade, synchronized to a live musical performance featuring Megan Schubert as Jane Jacobs and Tomás Cruz in a variety of roles, accompanied by NOW Ensemble, conducted by the opera’s composer, Judd Greenstein. Presenting this work in the midst of its subject—the city—was fitting and beautiful.

This performance occurred amidst COVID. It used an outdoor civic space for art and culture in new ways, filling it with an audiences hungry for a shared experience.

We are in the midst of a rare moment of opportunity when what a city can be is being rethought, people are open to making bigger changes faster, and questions of urban planning are being more widely recognized and understood as questions of life and death. Performing these excerpts outdoors, in this plaza, in this moment, felt perfect.

Selected Press:
WNYC New Sounds

River To River Festival
2017

A 25 minute excerpt of A Marvelous Order was presented live, in a site-specific adaptation, as part of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's annual boundary-pushing River to River Festival in 2017. Five vocalists and NOW Ensemble, the opera's "house orchestra", performed two scenes in the new Fulton Center transit hub in lower Manhattan. Robert Moses, performed by Dashon Burton, moved throughout the space, beginning on the lower subway level, moving up to street level to sing amongst pedestrians, and concluded the performance on the highest balcony, looking down on us from above.

50 video advertising screens throughout the space were "taken over" by the opera's animation. Meanwhile, in the subway tunnels below, animation loops from this work were presented without audio.

Selected Press:
The New York Times
The Forward

Times Square Midnight Moment
2017

Excerpts of animation from A Marvelous Order were presented on the big screens in Times Square 11:57-midnight every night during the month of May as part of the "Midnight Moment" program, presented by the Times Square Arts Alliance.

In conjunction with the Midnight Moment, I lead a "Jane's Walk" walking tour with Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, where we discussed the particular version of the Jane Jacobs' "Ballet of the Street" that plays out in Times Square. That intersection and the surrounding blocks are filled not only with tourists, but with New Yorkers who make their lives there. This had particular resonance for me because I grew up only 3 blocks away.

This collection of animation was titled "I LIVE HERE".

Williamstown
2016

A major residency and work-in-progress performance of A Marvelous Order was hosted by the Center Series at the '62 Center for Performing Arts in Williamstown.

The role of Robert Moses was performed by GRAMMY-winning vocalist Dashon Burton.

National Sawdust
2015

Two scenes were performed in concert with single channel animation at a gala supporting this work at National Sawdust.

Cyanotypes
Ongoing

I am creating a series of cyanotypes as part of this body of work.

Thirteen cyanotypes from this series were presented at the Palmer Museum of Art in conjunction with the World Premiere at the Center for Performing Arts at Penn State, in an exhibition titled "Every night we chase our shadows".

A few are shown below.

More works on paper from this project follow below—photographs, serigraphs and mixed media works.

Selected film stills and GIFs from A Marvelous Order follow below.

Education Program

We've created an educational curriculum in conjunction with A Marvelous Order that re-introduces students to their own town or city, revealing it as an impermanent, continually shifting constellation of structures.

Students engage with this work and are then given photos of contentious locations in their community to create renderings of what they would build—imagining themselves in positions of power.

Our goal is to create the “ah- ha” moments when students realize the buildings and infrastructure around them have not always been there, and are in fact the temporary result of human decisions.

Statement

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.

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.

The ''slums'' that Jacobs prevented Moses from clearing are now some of the world's most expensive real estate. With hindsight, it is nearly impossible to imagine the logic that would have destroyed lower Manhattan, but the same logic was applied to now-forgotten neighborhoods that lacked the twin privileges of wealth and Jane Jacobs, and have languished under Moses's unchecked bridge onramps and highway overpasses—and it is now just as impossible to imagine New York without those bridges and highways. Today, utopian visions of urbanism have returned, and large policy decisions are being made without significant input from those who are most immediately impacted. It is a moment that demands historical memory.

Our story is being told as an opera, with Jacobs and Moses in the central roles. But the main character of our opera is New York City itself, represented through a combination of the nameless people who make up the bulk of history, telling its truest stories, and a visual palette of found and designed images, turned into animation and incorporated into a three-dimensional set that will bring the transformations of New York to life. Moses and Jacobs are most relevant not for their personal stories but for their impact on the personal histories of millions of New Yorkers, and it is their story, collectively and as individuals, that looms above the struggle between the famous leads and their immediate circles of elites.

Through a combination of Tracy K Smith's writing, Judd Greenstein's music and Joshua Frankel's direction and animation, the story of New York, of cities, and of the struggle between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses will be told like never before.

Credits
World Premiere Production

Conceived by composer Judd Greenstein, poet Tracy K. Smith and visual artist and director Joshua Frankel.

Produced by ADH Theatricals, Andrew D. Hamingson, and New Amsterdam Presents

Megan Schubert, Jane Jacobs
Rinde Eckert, Robert Moses
Melisa Bonetti, Ensemble
Kelvin Chan, Bob Jacobs/Ensemble
Tomás Cruz, Ensemble
Blythe Gaissert, The Displaced Woman/Ensemble Christopher Herbert, Ensemble
Tesia Kwarteng, Ensemble
Kamala Sankaram, Ensemble
Hai-Ting Chinn, Swing

With special appearances by Dashon Burton, Eric Dudley, Jeff Gavett, Avery Griffin, and Jonathan Woody

NOW Ensemble
Michael Mizrahi, piano Mark Dancigers, guitar Alicia Lee, clarinet Evan Premo, double bass Alex Sopp, flute

Movement direction and choreography by Patrick McCollum
Music direction and conducted by David Bloom
Productiondesign by Andrea Lauer
Set design by David Ogle
Lighting design by Robert Bloom
Sound design by Greg Allen
Technology design by Fubbi Karlsson and Seth Kirby
Production stage management by Carly Levin
General management by Courtney Ozaki
Production management by Philip Naudé

Rebecca Marzalek-Kelly, associate director/choreographer
Francine Espiritu, associate director/choreographer
Lily Fang, animation technical director
Joyce Lai, assistant production designer
Billy D’Eugenio, assistant lighting designer
Racquel Acevedo Klein, associate music director
Georgia Markakis Mill, associate music director
Chris Griswold, assistant stage manager
Reesha Agarwai, assistant stage manager
Cam Vokey, video playback engineer
Charlie Campbell, audio

Will Rawls created choreography for the Williams College Workshop in 2016, portions of which are used in this world premiere.

Prerecorded audio edited and mixed by Justin Wright
Assistant animators Kelon Cen, Yupu Ding, Wenwen Hou, Patrick Pohl
Cinematographers Adam Carboni, Clayton Combe, Eric Haugesag, Joshua Kesner

Special thanks
Eve Biddle, BRIC/Emma Montoya Hills, Rachel Chanoff, Kelly Ruth Cole, Aimee Lynn Crihfield, Rebecca Crigler, Jeremy Daniel, Brett Dicus, Dave C. Frankel, Ron Frankel, Sita Frederick, Kurt Gardner, Curt Granet, Philip Gulley, Michael Hammond, Jim Jacobs, Peter Laurence, Valerie Lynch, Mark Morris Dance Center/ Elise Gaugert, Lynn Nottage, Sarah McLellan, Joe Philips, William Pinzler, Esq., The Press Room/Jim Byk and Kelly Guiod, Kamal Sinclair, Ben Smith, Nora Smith, Abby Tarpey, Jean Tatge, Theatre Row Theatres/Wendy Rowden, George Trudeau, Amy Dupain Vashaw, Michi Wiancko, Laura Williams, Monica L. Williams, and Boo Wong

Advisory Committee
Carlos Arnaiz, Founder and Principal, Carlos Arnaiz Architects
Kent Barwick, President Emeritus, Municipal Art Society of New York
Eugenie C. Cowan, Founder and Chairwoman, Exploring the Metropolis
Liz Diller, Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Karrie Jacobs, Contributing Editor, Architect Magazine
Peter Laurence, Author of Becoming Jane Jacobs, University of Pennsylvania Press
Tanu Kumar, Senior Planner for Economic Development, Pratt Center for Community Development
Peter L'Official, Assistant Professor of Literature, Bard College
Macky McCleary, Director, Rhode Island Department of Business Regulation
Todd Rogers, Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
Elihu Rubin, Associate Professor of Urbanism, Yale School of Architecture
Anthony Sargent CBE, Cultural Advisor, Toronto