- In this edition of Artistic Horizons Costuming for the Opera, - We now have about 50,000 complete costumes.

That's about a hundred thousand pieces when you count every coat, every pants, every shirt.

- The importance of independent comics, - I consider comics an art language.

It combines visual arts and storytelling.

It's honestly my favorite art form, - Exploring black womanhood through art.

- My exhibition is homage to the daughters in my family, to the lineage of my mother, my grandmother, and those before - An animated series promoting environmental awareness, - Educational, engaging, singable, and fun.

That's how you deliver a message through Music for Kids.

The magic is calling - Me.

It's all ahead on this edition of Artistic Horizons.

Hello, I'm Mark Ro, and this is Artistic Horizons.

The Sarasota Opera in Florida has a tremendous costume collection so big that it is one of the largest in North America with over 50,000 costumes from more than 100 opera productions, we visit their warehouse to find out more.

- I always refer to opera as the all-encompassing art form.

It is a musical form.

It's also a dramatic form.

It contains singers, orchestra, chorus.

It also has visual elements like sets and costumes.

So it's all of the pieces that create this wonderful - Art artwork, costumes and sceneries set you to the time and place.

- We have a a tens of thousands of costumes in our warehouse, and we do alterations on them for the particular person.

If we don't have a costume for a particular part, then we build it or we make it right here in the costume shop.

So we do both.

- For many years, Sarasota Opera had been renting costumes from companies throughout the North America, but our primary source was a company in Toronto called Mbar.

They were the largest and probably the best collection of rental costumes available for traditional opera productions.

Our costume designer, Howard Kaplan, worked with Mbar for a long time.

He also had designed specific productions for Mbar to build and rent, - And I became very close with the department managers and they said, oh, we've seen your sketches, so Luigi, your sketches.

And then Mr. Becca commissioned me to design pirates penance for Cleveland Opera.

- When the owner of Mali Bar, Luigi Speka decided he wanted to retire and slow down, he first came to Howard knowing that Howard had the same aesthetic and that Sarasota Opera would be a good steward of this incredible collection that he created.

- We purchased the collection in the fall of 2019, and it moved down in 10 tractor trailers.

During that time, we paid basically $33 a costume.

- We were lucky to be able to find a warehouse in a nice clean space.

Actually, before we used it, it was a volleyball gym that we were able to build out, and it's about 16,000 square feet.

We were able to house these costumes.

We now have about 50,000 complete costumes.

That's about a hundred thousand pieces when you count every coat, every pants, every shirt.

Sarasota Opera purchased this collection to use for their own use.

But a significant part of what we are doing now is renting these costumes to other opera companies, theater companies, universities, and we've actually done some work in film.

We've had some of our costumes featured in a Netflix feature.

We've also a Kia car commercial, used some of our costumes.

- The Kia people called us because someone had booked every 18th century costume in the whole city for a, I don't know what it was, some pirate movie they were doing.

So everything was on reserve.

They were desperate to find 18th century clothing.

- One of the things that we were surprised when we got these costumes from Ali Bar, a lot of them have name tags and ref and had the names of singers who've used them over the years.

Yeah, this one was worn by Mr. Pavarotti and has his name still in the label.

And we have other great singers as well.

People like Luo, pa, Beverly Sills, Plato Domingo, Marilyn Horn.

So it's great to have not only the wonderful costumes that they used, but also a little bit of history with them.

Nice space, - Marvel, everything is organized by shows or productions.

So there's a Tosca aisle, there's a Carmen aisle, there's a Ravita aisle.

- These dresses are made to be altered.

By that I mean the in seams are three or four inches.

The hems are maybe six or eight inches, so it can go up or down or in or out, but there is a lot of flexibility there to fit other people in that same dress.

- When working on a production, we'll first read the libretto, listen to the music, and then we'll move forward with sketches and purchasing of fabrics, going through our huge stock to see what we can use for that production.

Golden Cockrell, I would say is one of my favorite productions, and we did it years ago, L zero, which was a kind of a, an Inca opera.

There was a Inca art exhibit, art and textile exhibit up at the St. Pete Museum.

I was able to purchase replicas.

They were like Tea cozies or something, you know, copper plates and stuff.

You'd hang on the walls like, and then we were ended up being able to put 'em on the front of the armor and stuff.

So they really looked like real Inca copper pieces and gold pieces and stuff.

So that was kind of fun.

- One of the things I think is great about opera is that the stories are timeless and the music is so engrossing.

Many of our audiences are longing for that live performance experience.

And I've been really heartened by the fact that in the post COVID era, we've seen huge numbers of new first timers coming to the opera.

- I love the challenge.

I love the dedication that the artists have to their work.

They have to learn their music, they have to learn the language.

Every opera is maybe sung in a different language.

And so it's a, it's a very dedicated profession, and I appreciate that.

I enjoy being around that.

I love it.

- And now for the artist quote of the week, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, we meet cartoonist and multimedia artist Chris Sequeira as a lover of independent comics.

She is the co-owner of a bookstore, cafe and art space specializing in zines, prints and small press books and comics.

And she is a graphic novelist herself.

Here's her story.

- Jette is a superhero of mine, and this is an addition of my New York diary in Portuguese that I translated.

And I wrote an introduction for two.

Julie, I think she influenced me a lot because the disproportionate characters, maybe the giving you permission to have the characters look like that.

She's an absolute genius.

So this is a British cartoonist called Nathan Kry, and I suggested to my editor in Brazil that he would be a good person to, to publish in Brazil.

And it is my claim to fame that he did.

He's an amazing cartoon.

He is extremely funny.

So I consider comics an art language.

It combines visual arts and storytelling.

It's honestly my favorite art form.

We're at Lions Tooth, this is my shop.

Lions Tooth specializes in small press comics for kids and adults, no superhero comics, either it's comics for kids or it's comics that are what I consider art comics.

When you make independent comics, you play every part.

You are every character.

You are doing custom design, you're doing location couching.

Every aspect of it depends on you.

They are very authentic.

People are very passionate about it, and there's really no limits of what a comic can be.

My last name is pronounced Cicada, like the bug.

It's very different from the way you write it, and a lot of Americans will say, oh, I can't roll my Rs.

But then if you say cicada, you're actually saying the way that we say my name in Brazil.

So I was born and raised in Sao Paolo.

I moved to Milwaukee at 30 years old to go to WM for graduate school.

So when I was a kid, I would read comics all the time, but I was not, I did not like superhero comics.

I liked the, the comics that were made for kids.

And then somebody published Love and Rockets in Brazil, and that was when I became, I was like, what is this?

That's when it opened my mind.

So this is a edition of Jaime Andes, Maggie, the mechanic part of Love and Rockets.

And this one I did not translate.

I reviewed the text and I wrote an introduction and I included in the introduction this picture that Jaime drew of me, he was just making sketches at the San Diego Comic-Con, and that that was the sketch that he did.

So this is very dear to me.

After many years, not having confidence about drawing my own comic, the technology evolved that I can draw in a tablet in a comfortable way, and then working at Lion's Tooth and seeing everybody's work, I'm, I was kinda like, I should, I should do this.

Recently.

There's also some things that I discovered that kind of reminded me of what comics can be, and one of them is this book.

It's called Why Don't You Love Me?

It's a book that has not won, but Tooth Twist.

But the way that it's written and what it did, and the way that it references comics as a language reminded me that comics can be that.

So I, I, I wanted to give myself the chance to make a comic from beginning to end like a long form comic Used to be cute to like conspiracies.

We are living in a time, everything is black and white.

Everything is like in Portugal, say eight or 80, you know, like everything in the extremes.

And there's not a lot of conversation, there's not a lot of nuance in arguments.

So the book is a lot about the internet and misinformation and rumors.

Louisa the main character, she comes from a family of poem readers.

The three main character are basically Louisa, her grandmother and her mom.

Louisa's mom is a con artist.

She doesn't believe anything is real.

She doesn't believe in the ma, like there's no magic.

Like she would, would be like the hardcore atheist, you know, pragmatic person.

And her grandmother is a spiritual and intuitive.

So Louis is in between those two characters.

But what I hope this story is gonna show is that two things can be true at the same time.

You can have space for intuition and for the invisible world without throwing the baby out with the bath water.

And that's one of the things that I believe in, that the world is weird and mysterious enough without it being flat, without aliens being among us, without reptilians.

There's enough in art and science and the actual world that is mysterious and that we don't need to make up more.

- Now here's a look at this month's fun fact in this segment.

We take a trip to Ohio to meet Ana Hill, an artist, curator and community organizer who celebrates black womanhood by honoring those that came before her.

Take a look.

- I am Ayana Hill.

I am the creator and a part of Air principal.

So Air principal, so is a project.

It is also a collective and art space model where we really just honor and liberate black art and culture.

My contribution to No one Teaches How to Be Daughters is the corridor space, which is called, I didn't ask for my conception.

So in my process of helping Aja with her exhibition and creative direction and artistic visual, you know, translating her words to art, she decided four weeks before the show opened Ayana, you're gonna have the corridor essay says, I was like, okay, you gotta go crazy.

And I came up with the concept and I shot all the pictures in two days.

So I took her original exhibition statement about missing daughters and sisterhood and imagining life for black women and girls and creating an exhibition.

So my exhibition is homage to the daughters in my family, to the lineage of my mother, my grandmother, and those before, and really honoring that lineage of us all being in the same garden.

If I'm in it, I put, I set the camera up and everything, and I just had somebody touch the shutter for me.

So technically they do all still count as self fortress.

That one is large format.

So with that being a large format, it was like, okay, let me set this up perfectly.

Let me do the focus.

And then I had my cousin like, okay, you have to click this, you gotta take this out, you gotta put it back.

- And now here's a look at a few notable dates in our history.

Up next, we head to Virginia to meet the team behind Green Beats A-W-H-R-O produced series of animated shorts that spread environmental awareness.

Through music, we get an inside look at how the catchy tune for the series.

First episode was created.

Get up, get out, - And get outside.

Outside my door.

There's a world of adventure, so many tiny ones just to - See and feel.

It was really important that the first song specifically be a real, just get up off the couch and get out there and enjoy what's happening in nature every day.

If you don't get out there, you're missing out.

The power - Of nature is real.

The Baton Environmental Education Initiative is W's project funded by Jane Baton, local philanthropists to create a number of educational products related to the environment, including segments like green beans, get up, get out and get - Outside paper - Bottles and cans.

Everything from recycling, minimizing the use of straws and skip the straw, taking care of cleaning up after your dogs.

You know, you got to scoop that poop.

When you're writing an educational song, it's a slightly different creative process.

It's important that your language is not as poetic, but more a straightforward spelled out way that kids can digest and understand.

Get up, get out, and get outside.

Educational, engaging, singable and fun.

That's how you deliver a message through music for kids.

You have to make it fun, cozy.

If I'm gonna write a song about get outside and make it authentic, then I need to get outside and just sit down and listen for the symphony of nature and figure out like, what, what are those things?

One of the reasons to have an instrument along with me is just so that if I'm getting ideas for lines, I can see whether or not the line will fit.

Once I have a sufficient personal demo in place, that then I send it to my very favorite engineer and producer in the area, Jackie Palella with Tap, tap recordings.

Sky - Actually had a few things going on the song already, so once we get our scratch track down, usually we've got some bass, maybe we have some keys.

The song is already there.

I feel like sometimes I get to come in on the fun part, which is to kind of like decorate it and make it pretty.

Every instrument kind of has its own little vibe.

- We invited BJ Griffin to be a part of the project.

He's got an amazing voice, ridiculous skills on the cello.

The song needed to be very vibrant, catchy, and engaging.

BJ's voice was, was perfect for that.

Get - Outside.

I was really excited to be a part of a project that brought music and kind of a call to action to bring kids outside.

That's my dream, is to use my music to affect people.

And, and once I heard the song and it was kind of sry and had some really cool harmonies and, and it, I, I just knew it was for me and a whole magic from there - Out there with the blooms and the bugs and the smells and the sounds of this world that we love out there where it's cozy green, the magic is calling me.

- Oh, hey bj, how's your mix?

Do you need anything?

Oh yeah.

Louder, softer.

It's perfect.

Jackie.

She's usually at the helm and sort of cross fading things.

Figuring out what pieces we need to do over just - Weeding out - Little - Errors or being like, can we listen to it again?

Take this out, put that back in.

Let's move this around.

- It's pretty nerve wracking sometimes, but it was really nice to have Skye and Jackie out here.

It's really important to be open to collaboration.

- Get up, get out.

Having kids in the studio is different.

Having their voices be a part is gonna help encourage that kid listening, oh, this is where I'm supposed to sing.

- Magic is calling me.

We try to let them kind of riff a little bit and just like have fun and kind of walk into it on their own.

- Writing for education is one thing, but then when you know that you're writing a song that is also going to be animated, things need to pop out, that will then inspire the animator and create things that happen visually on screen that kind of get triggered by these lyrics.

- Even while Sky is working on the song, she'll send me drafts of the lyrics and I'll look 'em over and explore the possibilities of what story can be accompanied with that song.

My role is really to make it pretty and fun.

The way BJ sings his song, there's so much soul to it that I, I really felt there needs to be a character.

First thing that I see aside from a bird, you know, when I step outside, is our squirrels.

I really wanted him to be bj, A great smile, great facial expressions that, that hair animated dream.

- This is my first time being animated, I believe.

I don't know, we might have to change it to blonde now, right?

- Animation is in a way a form of acting.

You're not just taking an inate object and making it move, but you're, you're making it come alive.

Like to change up where I work, coffee shops, they're just good places to draw, sketching 'em out.

Once I have a full storyboard, I'll edit them into what's called an animatic, a shot by shot layout to show the producers what the concept is and they can ask for whatever changes.

So once that gets approved, then I'll start animating.

- At some point, he sends me a first demo, like a very rough cut of a video idea.

Jackie and I can pull that up on screen in studio and start seeing, okay, at this point in the video, he's got three little drops of water.

We should create a sound with, like, with a bell sound that actually sound like I can help make.

It's kind of neat to be able to actually tailor the music a little bit to some of the video.

The producer of the whole project will then add sound effects, - Scuffling - Of his feet, you know, so - I add some of that.

It really is such a collaborative experience.

It's very quilt like.

I bring the flavor of my song.

The vocalist brings the flavor of their voice, and then the engineer brings the flavor of her vision.

The animator creates characters and the producer of the project adds in extra sweetening to make this whole project that hopefully kids feel really excited and inspired by.

- The best way to create really strong environmental stewards of the future is to instill good environmental habits early.

- It was such a cool environment.

I knew it was gonna turn out really well.

- We have some kind of mind meld going where we get a lot of stuff done and we have a lot of fun.

- We all watch the final piece and take a breath.

- The natural organic effervescence that everyone has for the project is so contagious and exciting.

It's impossible not to walk away from a day of work on this project and not feel like you're actually making a positive impact on the world.

- The magic is calling me, and that wraps it up for this edition of Artistic Horizons.

For more arts and culture, visit wpbs tv.org.

Until next time, I'm Mark Ro.

Thanks for watching.