Funding for COLORES was provided in part by Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts.

New Mexico PBS, Great Southwestern Arts and Education Endowment Fund and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation, New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs by the National Endowment for the Arts.

And viewers like you.

Passionate about their heritage and proud to be Chicano, Chuy Martinez and Otilio Ruiz share music from the Chicano movement.

[SINGING IN SPANISH] Ziggy's Arts Adventure takes viewers on an exciting journey to learn about the magical world of art.

Countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo shares his journey from a boy soprano to a renowned opera singer.

It's all ahead on COLORES.

Yo Soy Chicano >> Otilio Ortiz: Yo Soy Chicano is like you are feeling part of something that is like, stronger than you think that it is.

So I heard from my parents in school that they were not allowed to speak Spanish when they were little.

So now we are teaching them like you can speak Spanish, you can just be proud.

So, Soy Chicano means I'm Hispanic.

I'm a Latino.

So you have to be proud and share what you have.

But they don't know.

The kids, they don't know exactly what they really have.

So it is our job to share with them the beauty of our culture.

>>Chuy Martinez: Yo soy Chicano.

Well that's another way of identifying and reassuring, you know, because what happens is assimilation.

It's a big thing here.

You know, you have to assimilate.

We all know that there's a lot of differences between cultures.

So the identity of a human being, it's very, very important.

I mean, the Chicano movement, it's all about identity.

It's also the struggle.

The Chicano movement music is it's about racism, inequality.

It's about discrimination.

So that's why a lot of La Raza woke up one day and looked at themselves in the mirror and said, Who am I?

I am Chicano.

Here we go.

[SINGING IN SPANISH] All my brothers come together right now.

All across the USA, I just wake up and say, [SINGING IN SPANISH] [SINGING IN SPANISH] I can fly just as high and as long as I want to.

Some people call me violent because I'm no longer the silent, [SINGING IN SPANISH] >>Chuy Martinez: When you convert an idea and put it into song or a poem, it fits better in society than if you just shout with a megaphone or microphone and then it stays in people's minds.

So people start, you know, singing it, identify with it, Chicano, yo soy Chicano Cuz I'm brown and I'm proud and I make it in my own way.

Ziggy's arts adventure.

>>Puppets: What are you going to paint up there?

The sky.

Are you going to paint it Earth blue?

Roy, my rocket man.

so new habitat.

Yes.

So do tell.

What color is the sky on your home planet?

Strawberry yogurt pink.

Ziggy is a nine year old space alien from a planet far far away that's never developed the arts.

And when Ziggy finds the Voyager One expedition, he hears music for the first time and realizes there are other ways of expressing emotion and comes to Earth to learn about it.

He meets a band of puppets who are all in the junkyard band, and there are six of them.

They each have a very distinct personality.

They each like a very distinct form of music.

They each have their own skill sets.

I'm really hoping that everybody can watch the show and pick which band member they relate to.

Our audience is K through five educationally.

That's what we're aiming at.

But I think that the audience can be quite a lot bigger than that.

This is going to be a show that parents like watching with their kids.

I think this is going to be a show that college kids tune in to because it's kind of funky and fun.

I'm hoping that we talk about art in a way that's going to be enriching and illuminating for a lot of people.

But specifically, we're making sure to hit core curriculum and art concepts that are going to hit K through five.

Elizabeth Foos who is our educational advisor and writer.

What Foos is able to do is to take both her and my passion for the arts and really understand not just what do kids need to learn, but also how they are going to best learn that information.

We try really hard to weave the vocabulary and the art curriculum into the narrative so that it's not that we take a break and talk about art, but that art is a thread that flows through the story and that kids and grownups alike can learn by having fun with these characters and not being taught directly to.

>>Puppets: Ziggy!

Hey, Nick, what are you doing?

Well, I'm in my creative space, so I'm from outer space and this is the band space and you're in your creative space.

I'm not sure I quite understand space.

Our first episode, the theme of the day is space.

And so not only do we want to talk about how space is used in an art form like painting, but we also want to talk about how space is used in our everyday lives so that there's a character who is trying to fill a space in the room and they're trying to figure out how to best do that.

And so now we have the art concept applied to art, but now also applied to real life.

I think that people misunderstand the point of arts education.

We like to think of it as a way to create artists.

And to me, the point of arts education isn't necessarily to create new artists, but it's to enrich the lives of all people.

Everybody's lives have benefited from the arts, and we've learned so much through the arts that I think it's really important and good for everybody, not just people who want to be artists.

>>Puppets; I'm making art that y with your own eyes that there's art for your eyes.

well, you have no idea.

My goal with this series is really to create art lovers out of anybody, whether they feel they have a talent in that area or not, that this is something that everyone can appreciate.

Arts education is one of the first things that gets cut in schools.

And so we really saw this as an opportunity to bring arts into the school system in a way that is fun and entertaining and really unique.

It's a really unique concept When you're designing a character and you know it's going to be your lead character, It feels like there's a lot of pressure to get it right, and thankfully we had quite a few years and there's been a couple of versions of Ziggy that we've honed in and gotten more and more right.

So there's a local artist named Barton Jilly, who does animatronics along with many other things, who collaborated with me on this version of Ziggy to create a version that we're both really excited about and proud of.

And I think that kids are going to both love, but also see themselves in.

Constructing the puppets is largely film and fabric.

Their bodies need to be fairly loose because there's an entire human hand that has to still fit inside of the puppet, but not so loose that they're floppy.

Then once I started trying to make the characters more complicated; They needed to blink.

Ziggy glows different colors in fact.

It required collaboration.

So Barton Jilly came in and we really redesigned all the puppets for the series anew and were able to put necks in their heads, which is sort of an incredible feat because you're taking something sort of soft and then putting a mechanical element that's hard, rigid and can't be smushed inside of it.

You have full body puppets.

We have legs on the puppets.

When you're doing the legs, you have to make sure that the joints bend like real joints and that they're not going to bend the wrong way and look broken.

I have a film degree from Savannah College of Art and Design, and we ended up that we had our production designer Christian is from Memphis.

He came the furthest for the shoot, but we really did find almost everything we needed in Baton Rouge.

The talent pool here is ridiculously wonderful and also a little untapped >>Puppet: Words aren't the best way to understand Dance >>Partner: Well movement does work better.

Every episode of Ziggy's Arts Adventure has a special guest star who is a wonderful, talented artist that we've pulled.

We had John Gray come play trumpet with us.

We had a former poet laureate of Louisiana as a guest star, Tom Henry, who's been an actor in Baton for years.

And we have a very, very special guest on our last episode with the First lady of Louisiana.

Donna Edwards is going to stop by and visit the junkyard.

>>Puppet: Neat!

The joke about puppetry is that every shot with a puppet is a special effects shot.

And so on a film set, if you have a big special effects shot, you save that for your afternoon.

You make sure you're planning around it.

We are doing pretty normal numbers of takes.

We're not doing too, too, too, too many takes, but that's mostly credit to the puppeteers being excellent and the crew being really good problem solvers.

But every time the puppet is on screen, there is an extra degree of challenge that comes it.

We brought a lot of crew in to film it, but one of the things I've always lacked was post-production and LPB digital team has done an incredible job doing all of the things you have to do for post-production, which, you know, editing sound effects and putting in the music, mixing There's a tremendous number of things that put the final professional touches on something that that you just simply don't have.

Usually by yourself.

This has been a true collaboration between LPB as a station and with Clay as the Creator.

Our team internally, our animation, our editors, the direction I think has really helped elevate the storytelling.

Clay also came in with just an amazing cast of puppeteers that he's worked with for years.

I actually think the series, as it goes along, every episode got better.

We learn things every single day on the set.

I think that's typical for the first season of anything that you do.

I am very, very pleased with where we ended up overall for this first season.

My long term goals for Ziggy are very ambitious.

I would love to see Ziggy have multiple shows, educational shows, entertainment shows, shows of different lengths.

There's so much I think we can do with these characters, Cut!

That's a wrap!

Hitting the high note.

>>JAROD BOWEN: Anthony Roth Costanzo, thank you so much for being with us.

>>ANTHONY ROTH COSTANZO: Thanks for having me.

To start, for people who don't know what a countertenor is, how do you describe it?

>>ANTHONY ROTH COSTANZO: You know, I sing in this very high register, which a lot of people call falsetto, and it is falsetto.

It's this high voice.

But falsetto has such an interesting history beginning in the 18th century with castrati, the castrated men who Handel and Mozart and Gluck and Vivaldi wrote all this operatic repertoire for.

But it's really carried forward.

Those those castrati were the superstars of their era.

And we see today a lot of falsetto singers in pop music.

And we just assumed that's the way it is, you know, from Prince to Michael Jackson to the Bee Gees to Justin Timberlake, there's lots of high male singing.

And basically I do the same thing, but in an operatic way.

>>JARED BOWEN: And how do you do that with your voice?

Is it a reach to find it?

>>Anthony Roth Costanzo: You know, it's a little bit of a technique, but basically, when you sing your vocal chords come together and they vibrate.

But if you bring them fully together because they're long as a male, then you have a lower voice, just like the long strings on a piano are lower.

But I artificially shorten them.

So I make a little chink and and through that chink, air escapes.

But I try and minimize that, but it sort of artificially shortens the chords.

>>JARED BOWEN: And why do you do it?

>>Anthony Roth Costanzo: When I was a boy soprano, I sang on Broadway and then I did opera and I loved singing high and I never associated pitch with gender, which is something we do a lot in culture.

We think that high as female and low is male, and therefore a male singing high is emasculated in some way.

But I've never experienced it that way.

I feel it's an expression of my identity.

JARED BOWEN: I read that you use imagery when you sing.

It's not something I've heard a lot of singers talk about.

>>Anthony Roth Costanzo: So how do I get these muscles and this old mechanism to function the way I want?

Well, if I send an image from my brain, along with the impulse saying sing, it can kind of move the involuntary muscles in one way or another.

So sometimes, you know, you're singing and you go, That's it.

It felt great.

But how can I recreate that feeling?

Well, let's imagine a flower blooming or let's imagine, you know, an oar going into the water or something like that.

And if you use that imagery, it actually trains your imagination to control those muscles a little better.

>>JARED BOWEN: Then I wonder when you're performing, how does that coalesce with acting?

>>Anthony Roth Costanzo: Absolutely.

You know, I think that acting is the foundation of what I do.

And every musical choice I make is based on the drama or the story that I want to tell.

Even if I'm singing Philip Glass and there are no words, I still want to tell a story.

I still want the audience to experience an emotional reaction to the sound that's coming out of me.

So I try and make every musical and vocal choice based on either character, narrative or some kind of emotional landscape, at least that I'm putting forward.

So even when I'm warming up and I'm going, Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Instead of just making it bland, I go, Okay, well, what would that sound like if it was really sad?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

And it changes the nature of the sound.

>>JARED BOWEN: When you were younger, you had thyroid cancer, and of course, the treatment targeted the throat, the vocal cords that that vicinity.

I'm wondering what kind of existential moment that was for you now, especially as you consider what your life is now.

>>Anthony Roth Costanzo: I feel so lucky to have had that experience where they scraped my thyroid off my vocal nerves, and that could have meant I wasn't going to sing again.

And I had to think to myself, Well, are you defined by singing?

And what I realized is I'm defined by my creativity, by my desire to connect people through art.

And so how can I have the most impact doing that?

Sometimes it's singing, sometimes it's creating a production, helping other people use their voices metaphorically and literally in different ways.

>>JARED BOWEN: And what does that mean for the role of singing in your life now?

>>Anthony Roth Costanzo: Well, I love every moment and every and every day that I can sing.

I love the act of it, and I love the catharsis of it from my own experience.

But I also like what it can do, especially the countertenor, in terms of drawing people in and making this art form, which can seem very obscure and sometimes shrouded in elite institutions and things like that more accessible.

>>JARED BOWEN :I suspect that's where an octave apart comes in.

An Octave Apart is a show that I created with the incredible trans cabaret legend Justin Vivian Bond.

And it began because I wanted to find a sort of exhilaration in classical singing.

Sometimes it feels very pure and very beautiful.

But where's the the exhilaration you get in a rock concert?

So in the image of Julie Andrews and Carol BURNETT at Carnegie Hall, Vivian and I created this show called Only an Octave Apart.

This is our last dance, Under Pressure.

Our voices, though an octave apart, seem worlds different.

And yet we come together and find this musical synergy and also this personal connection through the exploration of identity and the voice.

And it is both hilarious and poignant.

And there's an album that we made of it that's out so you can listen to it and you can see the show.

talks of the waters of our state.

It's the joy in your heart >>JARED BOWEN : When you went back and listened to the album, what most struck you That that totally works.

>>Anthony Roth Costanzo: We chose this one song that's a Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush duet, Don't Give Up.

I was singing rather the Peter Gabriel part, and Viv was singing the Kate Bush part.

And I'm talking about struggling so much with my life.

And Viv's voice comes on and says, Don't give up.

You still have us.

But no one wants you when you lose it, Don't give up because you have friends.

>>JARED BOWEN I've watched your Tiny Desk concert, by the way, and you just looked like you were having a ball.

>>Anthony Roth Costanzo: I have the best time with Justin Vivian Bond I've ever had on stage and doing this whole project.

I feel more like myself than I ever had on stage.

Often I'm portraying a character in a costume, and here I really am myself and have to find a way to actually perform myself and my singing on stage.

>>JARED BOWEN: Well, speaking of your characters, you have become so synonymous now with Akhenaten.

How do you take that?

How do you accept that mantle?

>>JARED BOWEN: Isn't it funny if you do something in your life and you think to yourself, When I die, if I'm lucky enough to get an obituary, someone will write, he famously played Akhenaten.

>>JARED BOWEN: The nudity, Is that a brave choice?

Would you consider it a brave choice?

>>Anthony Roth Costanzo: I think It serves a function in the storytelling.

I wouldn't do it.

You see this soon to be Pharaoh in the most vulnerable human state possible.

And you see him in a very cis male beginning that morphs over the course of the opera into a much more female incarnation.

So it raises interesting questions.

It brings the audience along on an intimate journey.

In terms of my own approach, it is terrifying.

Every time.

And so I guess there's an element of bravery about it, but there's also a sense of freedom.

When you step on the stage, you accept that there's no going back because you're in front of thousands of people and you don't have any clothes on.

So this is what it is.

And then you let go.

And instead of focusing people on the nudity aspect, you focus them on the kind of ritualistic aspect it can embody.

>>JARED BOWEN: So last November, you played Dracula for Boston Modern Orchestra Project.

This is a piece written for you.

What's that responsibility like?

>>Anthony Roth Costanzo: Well, John Galliano is a composer I've loved since I was a teenager.

I feel thrilled that he wrote it for me and with a role that is so rich, so juicy, so vocally challenging.

and simultaneously, a popular culture story that is Dracula, but also brings in these Greek retellings from Euripides that give a whole nother dimension to it.

>>JARED BOWEN: And it goes to what I think you were talking about earlier, about changing the form in creating new and something unexpected.

>>Anthony Roth Costanzo: You know, opera is a living art form and we have to find ways for it to continue to morph and to grow and to be an outgrowth of our current time.

>>JARED BOWEN: Well, it's been such a pleasure to be with you.

Thank you so much.

>>Anthony Roth Costanzo : Thank you so much for a beautiful interview.

The award winning Arts and Culture series Colores is now available on the PBS app YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and at NMPBS.org.

From classic episodes to brand new shows, Colores is everywhere.

Watch now on your favorite NMPBS platforms Funding for Colores was provided in part by Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts and Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation, New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs by the National Endowment for the Arts.

And viewers like you.