LIFT EVERY VOICE AND CELEBRATE
A New kind of Juneteenth festival, FREEFEST will meld opera, activism and so much more. Meet the Brooklyn-based co-Founders Ras Dia & Siobahn Sung
Siobahn Sung and Ras Dia, photographed in Domino Park by Winona Barton-Ballentine
When Ras Dia, a Brooklyn-born Harlem-bred Black man met Siobahn Sung, a Korean-American and California native it was a match made in creative, activist and horoscope heaven. “We are both Virgos and I am very proud of that,” says Sung, who met Dia when they were both working on Heartbeat Opera’s Breathing Free, a visual album nominated for a 2021 Drama League award, which focuses on Black empowerment in the arts. After connecting over shared loves and frustrations in the opera industry, this past March the new creative partners and friends launched ffflypaper, a production & imagination company with the goal to create and uplift artistic and community-centered projects. One of their first major projects is a big one: together they’re the co-founders and directors of FREEFEST, a Juneteenth Festival launching in partnership with Domino Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that will feature screenings, marches, DJ sets, a voter fair, and more. The ambitious project seeks to highlight a once overlooked historical event: June 19, 1865, when a Union General rode into Galveston, Texas and announced that the Civil War was over and slaves were free. REP CO sat down with the duo to discuss their inspiring careers, activism and the arts and what to expect at the festival.
You both have extremely impressive careers as storytellers, producers and creatives. Tell us about each of your career journeys: how you got started and how it brought you two together.
Ras Dia: I love opera — from 8th grade opera queen to trained opera singer, and, in recent years, opera producer — it is the essence of what it means to give voice to (your own) humanity in as dramatic and doing-the-most fashion possible. With this love came the orbit of low-paying job after lower-paying job to make auditions, pay for lessons, the notorious “perform for the exposure” gigs, the student debt from degrees that had nothing to do with surviving NYC. With some heavy questions about the point of it all, and a couch surfing, eat-pray-love moment in Morocco, Spain, and Germany, I found my epiphany: that what I had been struggling for wasn’t really a love for singing opera, but a love for its texture — an incredible world of creative voices — the industry of it all, the possibility of innovation and truth-telling in the arts, onstage and off.
Working my way through different institutional and freelance roles (cultural and academic), I have continued to do the reconnaissance work of wielding every project as a chance to learn or lead, and kind of activate the best parts of my digital, theatre, and community producing experiences in the creative process. Getting to adapt my skills as part of any call to authenticity, agency, and opportunity matter, so getting to meet Siobahn during my time as Creative Producer for Heartbeat Opera’s Breathing Free (filmmaker: Anaiis Cisco), opened my eyes to what my voice and the voices of Black and brown folx in the world could mean for the classical arts, when they are valued and centered in art-making that is about empowerment over exploitation. Through that experience we just resonated and vibed to the core. We mirror each other’s love for the arts, and desire to make our roles in it truly expressions of ourselves, our dreams and curiosity, and from a holistic framework, as fun, human, beautiful, bossy, dope, and outrageous as we want it to be.
Siobahn Sung: I think when one is engaged in an arts career, so much of the genesis of the career journey is just the personal journey. I grew up as an only child and my parents were always the audience, the costars, and the critics. I was constantly filming them, photographing them, interviewing them, and then producing little living room shows of me playing them in various scenes (they weren’t huge fans of this). But in this way, I feel that the idea of “performance” was always a reflection of my real-time experience of the world, and whether I was the one on stage or putting people on the stage, I was always trying to somehow tell my own story. And just like growing up, you learn to listen to others’ stories and realize that sometimes the most important thing you can do is do all you can to help them do it directly, just as you’d hope someone would do in assisting telling your own. When Heartbeat Opera decided to create the film Breathing Free I was less involved on the producer side (I was the social media/marketing manager) so I had a lot to learn by just observing Ras create a world around the film to live in and then deliver that micro world to the larger world. We got along really well and found that we could really trust and lean on each other during this process, so it became naturally apparent almost to an insanely casual level that we were like “Yeah I like working with you, and I want to keep doing that. And we should probably make our own way for that to happen.”
“From childhood I have never understood how June 19, 1865, a date when all people living in America were aware of the abolition of slavery is not the most American ‘holiday’ to honor. It says something about the living myth of independence in our country, but it’s also an opportunity to celebrate Black freedom regardless of the failings of the systems that challenge it.”
Siobahn Sung and Ras Dia, photographed in Domino Park by Winona Barton-Ballentine
The world at large is waking up to issues that many BIPOC people have been familiar with for a lifetime. How has this response affected you personally?
RD: I greet this awakening with one scoop of indifference, a pinch of hesitation, and a whisper of frustration, then I throw it away. BIPOC people have been living with these issues for generations, and the emergence of the pandemic gave enough people nothing else to do — though beyond the performance of equity, its acronyms and umbrellas, I hold a tiny (but not cynical) hope that perhaps this awakening is just a planting of seeds that will engender better American and global realities. Race is real, and Siobahn and I, while we come from different heritage cultures, are equally disappointed in the perpetual labor expected/required of colored folx in the horrifying “discovery” of injustice and white complicity in the arts.
SS: I hesitate to make a largely declarative statement on behalf of all BIPOC, but I 100% feel it in my bones when I say: beyond this being a “call” or a “responsibility,” it just IS WHAT IT IS. Yes, this is life. Yes, the global acknowledgement of it is long long overdue. I’ve been as loud as I can about it all my life and now I’m going to be even louder. Again, everything I put out into the world whether it’s “work” or “personal” is always going to be linked to answering the questions of: 1) does this authentically align with my values 2) if not, what am I going to do about that?
“I greet this awakening with one scoop of indifference, a pinch of hesitation, and a whisper of frustration, then I throw it away. BIPOC people have been living with these issues for generations, and the emergence of the pandemic gave enough people nothing else to do.”
It’s been quite a year! When you launched your production company together, ffflypaper, what was the initial intention and goal? Has it changed over the past year and how has 2020 — the pandemic, the protests, the news — impacted you each professionally?
RD: Of course part of the inspiration for ffflypaper is drawn from opera as “the land where the muses play”, which allows us to think of our company as a point of intersection in the arts, which is to say we want to remain flexible and adaptable — generating media, exhibition, film, theater, TV, research, and musical projects that we feel close to and want to develop as we aggregate resources and build our bandwidth. The other side is drawn specifically from the Hughes and DeCarava book The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a kind of fiction and photo essay. What attracts us to it is the execution of perspective, that these Black creators were the narrators and exhibitors of work from their own given and chosen perspective. The framing, the crafting, and the care, in a generation that had seen Gershwin and Carl van Vechten as the curators of Black imagination. So I guess the point is something to do with how we want to use art as a signpost or cultural point of reference, and more tellingly, a response to who gets to hold and not hold power — and, how that truth shapes the world, and the worlds to come. In a sense, I’m grateful that the pandemic and protests aligned — they feel like bedfellows rooted in what makes America so inequitable. Professionally, it has been a tricky road, because with a reassessment of how arts institutions (and by definition, people) benefit from the culture of white supremacy comes an implicit shame and blame. Both with a certain pivoting to feigned “accommodation” or promised reviews of alienating hiring/casting practices, pay disparity, and the like, with the obvious finding that Black and Brown people have no equitable or intergenerational heritage in the arts system, save tokenism, copycatism and “community” programs aimed at relieving an unvoiced guilt. In professional circles and settings, I have been asked, but it never feels like a request, so I’ll also be positioned to voice how the code of racism affects my lived experience. What does it cost a white person to demand that I explain how the denial of my humanity for over 400 years “plays” into my self-worth, love, honor, or pride during a team production meeting? Ultimately, this all helps me to double down on the purpose of our company, which is to engender empathy, community, and imagination with an active emphasis on who the people, clients, and partners we engage are and want to be.
SS: We established in March, so we are still a baby company. Preceding that, we had a phone conversation in January (I was in a COVID hotel, that’s another story!) about what working together in the future might look like. We talked about this incredible book called The Sweet Flypaper of Life (I had just happened to have received it as a gift at the time), which is a visual poem by Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes. Basically Mr. Hughes was a big fan of Mr. DeCarava’s photography, which depicted Harlem life in the 50s through this quotidien lens. Mr. DeCarava wasn’t trying to make a huge statement, but this work did end up basically saying, hey Black Americans are more than what you see in the media. These are the intimate, real, beautiful moments of their everyday lives. What then came out of this is an undeniable acknowledgement of community that often gets overlooked, diminished, or bastardised. Then you consider what Langston Hughes was doing with his poetry; this going deep inside to say how complicated and layered his own ancestry and legacy and the process of identity is in light of all those things. And you put them together and automatically there is a great accountability there to ask the questions of what defines a renaissance? Which communities get served? How does art somehow always become a function, a canon of how we observe and carry out storytelling? And I think that’s what ffflypaper is about. Ras and I ourselves have so much intersectionality between us, and we know there is much more that we cannot speak to, but we want to create more fortified avenues for those stories to come through. The pandemic, the protests, the news, though catalysts for these pertinent conversations, were not necessarily the foundation for what needed to happen. It was a proverbial pot boiling over of everything that was inevitably going to come out. In addition to this, we are just sick of seeing people make dusty art that serves the same myopic audiences so we’re ready to hit a hard shift on that as well.
“I’m grateful that the pandemic and protests aligned—they feel like bedfellows rooted in what makes America so inequitable.”
-Ras Dia, co-founder of FREEFEST
Now you both have an ambitious and exciting project planned: FREEFEST, a Juneteenth festival, which you plan to make an annual festival. Tell us about the genesis of the festival.
RD: FREEFEST is a celebration and commemoration of Juneteenth. From childhood I have never understood how June 19, 1865, a date when all people living in America were aware of the abolition of slavery is not the most American “holiday” to honor. It says something about the living myth of independence in our country, but it’s also an opportunity to celebrate Black freedom regardless of the failings of the systems that challenge it. Along with my feeling that everyone should be celebrating it, comes another sense — we are all entitled to celebrate it the way we see fit — no one can own or dictate how it is celebrated. So in Year 1, ffflypaper gets to do this in a way that matches our present moment, which is to say that the health regulations and styles or ideas through which we shape the celebration in future will change. Who are we to say that a celebration of Black liberation can include an operatic film with work by Beethoven? ffflypaper.
I paired the wish of expanding awareness around Juneteenth with my desire to share the visual album Breathing Free as often as possible, and voilà, the seed was planted, a public screening event for the film on Juneteenth in an outdoor setting that would give this timely cultural film a COVID-safe public showing. Siobahn and I deeply considered what it means to commemorate or show respect for this day, and it became so clear that this festival could be a beautiful way to synergize issues that impact Black communities. So through creative inception, we sought to build out the experience of celebrating Juneteenth over one week as a virtual to in-person series. We have an intimate network of partners for whom this festival is becoming a unique community focusing on freedom and access in Brooklyn. Our partners are fostering voter rights and advocacy (NYC Crew Count), and giving a platform to youth and LGBTQ creators, artists, and activists (Reel Works, The Empire Marching Elite, and We Build The Block). Our partners also include the African-American Roller-Skate Museum, Broadway Stages, and WQXR, and will be highlighted alongside artists from the visual album and other special guests, including Shayla Lawson and Jeremy McQueen, with support from Heartbeat Opera, and huge hearts, immense trust, and gorgeous views courtesy of Domino Park.
SS: I’ll let Ras speak more to the particulars of Breathing Free, which definitely centers the festival and became a vehicle for us to establish this event, but again I’ll just point out that the same genesis of what made the film is what made the festival — we very clearly and frequently painfully know that there are vacuums of representation in “high” art and vacuums of support in communities or even what we celebrate as people. FREEFEST is about SPACE and PROVISION. Space to gather, talk, celebrate, observe, and honour everything we can that has been criminally overlooked and marginalised by our country (and beyond). The fact that Juneteenth was relatively unknown to most Americans IS the problem, and celebrating it doesn’t solve the problem, but being provided the space to do so and with the support of institutions that have failed has to now become the standard of recognition, reparation, and redefining who we are as Americans and members of the global citizenry.
“FREEFEST is about SPACE and PROVISION. Space to gather, talk, celebrate, observe, and honour everything we can that has been criminally overlooked and marginalised by our country (and beyond).”
Siobahn Sung and Ras Dia, photographed in Domino Park by Winona Barton-Ballentine
The festival will be focusing on the intersection of Black American experiences, artistry, affirmation, healthcare, voter rights, community building, justice and legislation, queerness, and activism. It’s an ambitious, important and needed event! What do you have planned for this first festival?
RD: This celebration will not be televised, but stay connected and subscribe to www.ffflypaper.org for more details.
SS: You’ll just have to come and find out.
The festival will be both in-person and virtual, which is very indicative of the world we live in right now. It also makes it more accessible to people who aren’t in the area. What was your experience like trying to plan a festival during a pandemic?
RD: Luckily, I’ve been able to lean on my pre-pandemic experience working as the Met Opera’s Live in HD Assistant Producer, as well as pandemic era digital projects with the San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Symphony, Jessye Norman at 75 (presented with support by Brookfield Place and the Ford Foundation), as well as the online premiere of Breathing Free, which ran as a series, and my current role as Line Producer at Little Island. All of these add a layer to how we’re conceiving and realizing this vision in a way that feels accessible but not hampered by the challenges of the pandemic. While we BLESS and ACHE for what now seems like easier times, we’re proud of the space to react to the world we inhabit and find the best way to connect and celebrate people right now.
SS: I think it’s fair to say we both had a lot of practise because it’s essentially a demand that was placed on almost every art community during this pandemic (insert dreaded graveyard phrase “PIVOT DIGITALLY” here). We are so fortunate to have FREEFEST be conceived on the eve of live events coming back into the NY social sphere, and be accompanied by the virtual lead-up that is as inclusive as possible. The short answer is that we are very, very lucky by how many people have continuously said yes, yes, yes, what do you need, how can we help and in the most crucial ways that’s helped keep the momentum going. We’re lucky for the pushback as well, because it reminds us of why we’ve done what we’ve done and the work that keeps needing to be done going forward.
“Juneteenth is a celebration of everyone’s liberation, and in that sense more ‘American’ than the 4th of July. Every American should be celebrating it in whatever way they can, understanding its history.”
One of the many exciting events of the festival will be the screening of the visual album, Breathing Free, which was the first project you worked on together and it’s where you met. Tell us about Breathing Free and how it both inspired the festival and cemented your partnership?
RD: Being brought into Heartbeat Opera’s Breathing Free as a Black freelance producer began with an expected hesitation as I worked to understand what Heartbeat, a predominantly white and white-passing organization was hoping to create on the subject of Black Lives Matter. Fortunately, the team of Black guest artists they assembled, like myself, brought honesty and hope to every stage of the project, stirring in me a desire to honor their labor and art. While the germ of the project relied heavily on whiteness, which is to say traditional understandings in the opera world about how inclusion is often about being seen/heard onstage, rather than having creative and fiscal control, we as a company were able to craft a film that wove together music from Beethoven’s Fidelio with art songs and new arrangements of Negro spirituals by Black creators to lay a scaffold for how the classical arts can create points of entry to conversations on the many forms of Blackness and many kinds of Black experiences that have far more happening beneath a passing mention. To the festival, Siobahn and I seek to bring a method of convergence we began developing for the initial presentations of Breathing Free, which reached across discipline and affinity group engaging professionals from the ACLU, the NYPD, the Innocence Project, PEN America, Color of Change, Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project, candidates and representatives for New York City and State political office (Senator Jabari Brisport, Paperboy Love Prince, and Brandon West), as well classical arts industry figures like Davóne Tines, Karen Slack, and Alexa Smith, professors from the University of Michigan, Georgetown, Smith, and Amherst, alongside teaching artists from Carnegie Hall, and Lincoln Center. Through that push for engagement we leaned on and learned so much from each other’s joy, trauma, and inspiration in the arts, and how they resonate and align with the lives and worlds we inhabit.
SS: I give Ras all the credit for being a less fearful and bigger dreamer than me. To be fair, we are already finding out we are very good at sharing the lead (lol “professionally verse” is how I think about it) and we sort of build off of each other’s ideas. Breathing Free didn’t tell us anything new that we didn’t know about the classical arts, but it gave us a chance to begin somewhere and push something forward that started bridging what we’re missing in the classical arts and the myriad of things that can be said and shown to those audiences. It introduced us to a team of people whose vibrancy and talent absolutely belong on the same plane. I won’t spend the time shading what the project wasn’t, but I will say it was the bedrock of a lot of conversations Ras and I were having about what we wished art could do, how much it is capable of accomplishing, and we find each other there a lot of the time. In my opinion, all good partnerships come from a mutuality of taste as well, and Ras and I love and hate a lot of the same things.
“I was born in Brooklyn, raised in Harlem, and worked in Williamsburg over the past few years. That view of the water, cityscape(s), and bridge from the southern tip of Domino always reminds me of the many ways our city is connected.”
-Ras Dia, co-founder of FREEFEST
The slate also features a lot of other great events — there are screenings, marches, DJ sets, a voter fair, and more. What events are you each most excited about?
RD: I’m excited to see the whole damn thing, BUT, I have to say The Empire Marching Elite are the marching band I wish I was a part of as a kid, and the opportunity to celebrate NYC’s violence interrupters as part of the inaugural FREEFEST Honors ceremony rise to the top.
SS: It’s hard to decide what I’m most excited about because every aspect of the festival is important and amazing (yes, early voting is exciting!). I’m looking forward to seeing people gathered joyfully and hearing music at louder decibels in a public place than I have in a long time (but still respectful: don’t worry, Domino!).
Why did you decide to launch it in Brooklyn and how did the collab with Domino Park come about?
RD: I was born in Brooklyn, raised in Harlem, and worked in Williamsburg over the past few years. That view of the water, cityscape(s), and bridge from the southern tip of Domino always reminds me of the many ways our city is connected. Practically, we wanted to be outdoors for such a screening event during the pandemic, and I had seen enough cultural programs at Domino to hope that my cold-call (email) might be of interest to them. Mike Lampariello, Domino’s Director, was just about the kindest stranger you could pitch a project to, without any kind of context, haha! Suffice it to say, Domino made what is already a tough project that much easier.
SS: Domino’s programming since its nascence has been more imaginative, freer, and varied than you’d think a public park could be. I live in Brooklyn and feel very passionate about the Brooklyn community. I also feel strongly about bringing anything remotely classical arts related out of Manhattan as much as possible. It would be a dream to see FREEFEST happen in all five boroughs in the coming years.
“Juneteenth signals freedom, joy, and celebration to me. But at the same time, it points out an acknowledgement of a very real reality in which Black and POC communities are expected to rely on white people to award and designate when/where/how/who to be, even in the name of celebration.”
Let’s talk about Juneteenth. On June 19 in 1865, a Union General rode into Galveston, Texas and announced that the Civil War was over and slaves were free — two and a half years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Tell us about the importance of Juneteenth and what it means to you?
RD: Even the reaction of Black people to their own “liberation” was not monolithic. Some stayed essentially remaining in the same conditions, or working as sharecroppers, others dropping their shovels (and forced labor) at the end of this life-changing proclamation. This is the turning point for what freedom would look like for all Americans, as fraught and ill-managed as it was and is.
SS: Juneteenth signals freedom, joy, and celebration to me. But at the same time, it points out an acknowledgement of a very real reality in which Black and POC communities are expected to rely on white people to award and designate when/where/how/who to be, even in the name of celebration. It is a point in history where we can draw comparisons and contrasts to, and hopefully be the arbiters of a close-at-hand future in which the contrasts become more profound rather than the same-as-it-ever-was-ness.
Siobahn Sung and Ras Dia, photographed in Domino Park by Winona Barton-Ballentine
Texas was the first state to declare Juneteenth a state holiday but shockingly, it’s still not a national holiday (while Columbus Day is, bafflingly!) and it’s recognized to varying degrees around the country. Why is this and how do you hope events like your festival will help change that?
RD: Huzzah -— entirely bafflingly! Juneteenth is a celebration of everyone’s liberation, and in that sense more “American” than the 4th of July. Every American should be celebrating it in whatever way they can, understanding its history. I would love for this festival to be realized as a celebration across the five boroughs and across the country at some point. Black and brown folx are still fighting many of the prejudices planted in response to Abe Lincoln’s emancipation, which is to say for every step forward, it’s two steps back. We have to be mindful that freedom isn’t an act of law or executive order, but a signpost of our remaining vigilant, brave, empathetic, and progressive.
SS: Exactly that ^. Also: fuck Columbus Day.
How do you define activism? Was there a defining moment or experience that made you identify as an activist?
RD: I think activism is a system of response to critical and systemic issues. Activists seek social, legislative, and moralistic change using this system to break down, challenge, call out, and remedy any given system (of issues) that doesn’t actualize full humanity and rights for all people, and rally people and efforts around their cause. While I don’t think of myself as an activist, I think the “calling out” of systems is something art can point towards, and feel that artists and arts facilitators can use art to engage and advance awareness and activism. Adding that I think the more artists focus on genuinely engaging the world we live in through art (in not necessarily didactic ways), we more clearly see how art is that articulation of humanity.
SS: Activism is making moves, plain and simple. It’s proactively reacting and being confident that you have the power to enact change WHENEVER you want. I’m less interested in defining moments of trauma and my rejection of that as defining points of my activism, and more driven toward the identification of my experience as empowered and visible. And in order to be more visible, you cannot wait for someone to grant you their gaze.
Who or what do you look to for inspiration with your activism work?
RD: I think of the ancestors who gave me everything, and the generations to come.
SS: I try to learn from every single person in my life and take note of how their individual activism manifests. It doesn’t have to be a storied author or a beloved professor or an influencer with a big following. It can be in the small, simple, grounded ways in which everyone takes care of and contributes to their communities.
“I try to learn from every single person in my life and take note of how their individual activism manifests. It doesn’t have to be a storied author or a beloved professor or an influencer with a big following. It can be in the small, simple, grounded ways in which everyone takes care of and contributes to their communities.”
Lastly, how can people get involved in the festival?
RD: Email freefest@ffflypaper.org to volunteer, RSVP for the virtual festival, and join us for the Festival Day at Domino!!!
SS: Please get in touch with us!
What do you hope people will take away from this interview and anything else I haven’t asked that you want to share or want readers to know about?
RD: We all get to make choices, and follow our gut in any aspect of our lives. It’s our birthright.
SS: As Paperboy Love Prince says: it’s our time. Believe that.