Poet Laureate Maya Angelou wrote a far better poem than my eponymous title, but I wanted to revisit flying things. I also thought I might borrow fame and evoke a punny smile – please let me know if I succeeded...

In a previous post, I asked what a dragon was, and how would be the best way represent it, given the constraints of budget and stage size. In this post I want to discuss another flying (but non-firebreathing) creature – the woodbird from Siegfreid. In this opera, Siegfried is at first confounded by his inability to communicate with the woodbird, and then after tasting the dragon's blood, finds himself able to speak directly with it. So, if you were staging Siegfried, how would you create the character of the bird?

Let me tell you of a few ways that I came up with:

1. We could obviously dress the soprano in a bird suit, replete with feathers.
   
   
2. The soprano could sing upstage, with a downstage mechanical bird being controlled from the wings (either flying by wires, or run on a track).
   
   
3. The bird could be a puppet, controlled onstage by a black-clad puppeteer (with the black outfit our cue that we shouldn’t see him or her).
   
   
4. The bird itself could be played another non-singing actor (or perhaps even a dancer), so that the bird’s movements could be very free, leaving the soprano to concentrate only on her singing.
   
   
5. The bird could be more abstract, such as a bird-shaped spotlight, accompanying the soprano (or even a point of light on a wire, similar to Tinkerbell in the Mary Martin/Cyril Ritchard version of Peter Pan).
   
   
6. The bird could be an appendage attached to the soprano (imagine a 4-to-6 foot flexible staff connected to the back of the singer's costume, with a bird on the end of it, hanging in front of her).
   
   
7. The bird could be a prop on a staff held by the soprano, much like a scepter or mace of office.
   

I am certain that the creative amongst you can think of a few ways that I missed, but I will spoil it for you and tell you that it is the last of my alternatives that was chosen by Opera Theatre of Pittsburgh.

But now comes one of those interesting turns of fate, where an actor is presented with an opportunity to use a skill learned long ago. So long ago, in fact, that perhaps she never thought she’d use it again…

It turns out that our soprano learned to twirl a baton as a child. She was never a cheerleader or anything like that. But now the woodbird – perhaps originally imagined as a “bird on a stick” – really flies! Don’t laugh (okay, you can smile), but really! It works! Just like the 5-piece Dragon McNuggets, the bird-on-a-stick flown by the soprano herself is utterly convincing. It is yet one more fascinating artistic choice that this company has used to tell Wagner’s epic tale.