Part II — Rock Opera Teaching Module (4:00–8:00 PM)
Red Helicopter ®: A Humanistic Roadmap for Manifesting and Operationalizing Change
A Live Case Study in Building Cultural Infrastructure
March 28 | 12:00–8:00 PM | Tsai CITY | Free and Open to the Public
On March 28, artists, students, civic leaders, and cultural leaders and entrepreneurs from all walks of life will gather at Tsai CITY to immerse in the operating system of Red Helicopter® This will be a day-long public program exploring how personal narrative and values can become the foundations for institutional change.
The event is the culmination of a citywide bookclub where participants are invited to read Yale University’s Cultural Innovation Lab Artist-in-Residence, James Rhee’s global best-selling book, Red Helicopter: A Parable for Our Times©.
Designed as a multi-model and multi-sensory experience, the event will make manifest the future-forward principles underlying the book and demonstrate how humanistic inquiry—story, ethics, interpretation, authorship—can translate directly into operational frameworks, institutional design, and sustainable cultural infrastructure in business and in society.
The event is produced by Red Helicopter® and is hosted by Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale, Neighborhood Music School, New Haven Arts Council, and Tsai CITY.
Part II — Rock Opera Teaching Module (4:00–8:00 PM)
The afternoon transitions into a workshop presentation of Red Helicopter: An American Rock Opera©, created, written, and produced by James Rhee. Featuring performances and music by Rhee, Yale alumnae Frances Pollock and Ye Jin Min, and Jasmine Barnes.
4:00-5:00 will be a fireside chat between Rhee and Director of Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale, Frances Pollock
5:00-6:30 will be the performance of Red Helicopter: An American Rock Opera © accompanied by Solaris
6:30-8:00 will be a reception and discussion.
Excerpts from the musical will be performed and examined in real time as a case study in structural thinking. The session demonstrates how a book becomes a musical, how narrative becomes architecture, and how values become operational decisions that AI can never replace.