UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance presents the premiere of Heidi Rodewald's A Lifesaving Manual on Saturday, May 7 at 6 p.m. PT. A Lifesaving Manual is a multimedia presentation that will be available for free on the CAP UCLA Online channel online.cap.ucla.edu.
Heidi Rodewald's newest project, A Lifesaving Manual, with lyrics by Donna Di Novelli, samples words and phrases from Red Cross Lifesaving Manuals published over the last century and composes them into an audiovisual meditation on aid, safety and care. With direction and visual composition by
Joshua Higgason, A Lifesaving Manual features vocals by
David Driver, Rodewald and Stew. Rodewald's multi-layered music for guitar, bass, piano, trumpet, woodwinds, strings and drums elegantly fuses her pop and rock sensibilities. Enveloped in a filmic score of life-saving diagrams, text and day-to-day encounters, A Lifesaving Manual contemplates how caring for each other and our world is caring for ourselves.
Rodewald is the Tony Award-nominated, Obie Award-winning co-composer of the musical Passing Strange, which transferred from
The Public Theater to Broadway in 2008 and then was made into a film by director
Spike Lee. Rodewald joined the band The Negro Problem in 1997, where she began a longtime collaboration with singer/songwriter Stew, and with him released ten critically acclaimed albums. She is co-composer with Stew of Brooklyn Omnibus BAM Next Wave Festival (2010), Making It St. Ann's Warehouse (2010), Family Album Oregon Shakespeare Festival (2014), Notes of a Native Song Harlem Stage (2015), Wagner, Max! Wagner!! Kennedy Center (2015), and The Total Bent at
The Public Theater (2016). Rodewald scored two short films for director
Leigh Silverman: Over The River & Through The Woods (2017) and Reprieve (2018). She is the composer with librettist Donna Di Novelli of The Good Swimmer at BAM Next Wave Festival (2018). Rodewald's upcoming new album, also titled A Lifesaving Manual, with lyrics by Donna Di Novelli, will be launched in May 2022.
Joshua Higgason (video director/designer) is a video, scenic, lighting, and interactive designer, creating experiences for theater, concerts, opera, and events. Shows at UCLA include The Ambassador (video design) and Dorothea (video content). Recent video designs include Cosi Fan Tutte and Falstaff for Opera di Firenze; Die Ägyptische Helena and Hansel und Gretel for La Scala; Blue for Michigan Opera Theater; Purcell's King Arthur for Staatsoper Berlin and Theater An Der Wien; Mackie Messer- Eine Salzburger Dreigroschenoper for Salzburger Festspiele; Acquanetta for
Bard Summerscape; Aging Magician for San Diego Opera; Powder Her Face for NYC Opera; Persona for LA Opera;
Lucinda Childs' The Day;
Ira Glass' Seven Things...Tour; and Sufjan Stevens' Carrie and Lowell Tour. His work has been seen at
Carnegie Hall, Salzburg Festspiele, Bayreuth Festival, BAM, TED, The Public, MoMA, Panorama Festival NYC, Beacon Theatre, and many others. He is an instructor of performance design at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
A Lifesaving Manual is an album and audiovisual recorded cycle of songs originally created for The Good Swimmer, a theatrical performance that premiered at the BAM Next Wave Festival in December 2018. Support for the development and premiere of the music, lyrics and performance was provided by Terry Eder and Gene Kaufman,
Steve Klein/Apple Core Holdings,
Linda Myers, Christine and
Michael Garner, Jill and William Steinberg, David Henry Jacobs, Sherwin Goldman, Ann Harrison, Susan Bienkowski,
Jamie deRoy,
Dan Shaheen, and Connie Chen, and with residencies at Eugene O'Neill Center, Bowdoin College, UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance, PROTOTYPE festival and Brooklyn Academy of Music.
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