Category: meeting minutes

[cross-posted from Dale’s blog]

Forging ahead, Marc, Dale, Carol Lee, and Laura in attendance.

Carol Lee has finished two sunflowers:

They are quite magnificent. We began to see a lot of possibilities now for choreography. Dale suggested that we keep in mind the Silly Symphony cartoons, with their simple and repetitive patterns. They’re a lot of fun to play with, and very easy to make into characters.

Dale reported on his adventures in Hedgehog Land: he worked with Sherry Lambert’s kindergarteners again on the MMH Arrives sequence, and they’re getting quite good at it. He then tested them on some ideas he had for the Marmalade Man Makes a Dance to Mend Us, where he asked them to strike hedgehog poses on the beat. Then they played follow-the-leader, taking a step and striking a pose on the beat. It worked, so we’ll actually be able to stage both MMH pieces! He also sent letters home to the parents so they could decide whether their hedgehog would be able to participate in the May 3 performance.

Then we forced ourselves to get to work on visuals for Sun & Moon Circus [SMC].

Marc continued his study of the circular bed, the Gang in pyjamas, King of Cats as ringmaster:

That’s a magic lantern the Tiger is holding, projecting moons/stars/suns onto the circus action around them.

Carol Lee grumbled about being a three-dimensional artist (i.e., hot glue) being forced to work in a two-dimensional framework, but she approximated successively nonetheless:

Here she has the sunflowers listening to the Moon’s lounge act. Looking at this idea, it occurs to Dale that we can actually write in a vocal part for the Moon in the circus sequence, sort of a Cirque du Soleil descant thingie.

A simple image, for creatures clapping. We probably could come up with a few more, paws and fangs, to add to the mix.

After working with paint last week, Dale went digital this week, using a program called ArtRage. It’s very gorgeous, and it comes in a free version for both Mac and that other platform, from Ambient Design. There’s also a $19.95 version that has layers, worth it if you can afford it.

Here the tiger is awakened by fitful, flashing light, streaming through his window. He has managed to get his paws on a bit of it.

We do not have workshop next week, April 3, because it’s spring break and Dale and Marc and Carol Lee will be in New York City. In fact, by this time next week, we will already have had lunch with Nancy Willard!

[cross-posted from Dale’s blog]

Another workshop, another meeting of brilliant minds: Dale, Marc, Carol Lee, Melissa, Laura, and Mary Frances.

We shared some homework each of us had done re: winter/spring images for the MMH’s banners.

Marc had done some nice sketches of dead leaf/new leaf, snowflake/sun that were good. He had a fun pennant with a hibernating critter on it.

Melissa had a two sided banner, to wit:

Dale cheated, just photoshopping a winter tree:

Still, the image is compelling, and we thought that maybe this kind of image might be an interesting way to proceed.

Carol Lee went for texture:

Hard to tell in the photos, but the one on the left is brown, the one on the left is yellow. There would be lots of movement in it. Marc had the idea of putting an image like mine or his on the dangly bits. Dale remembered the image transfer sheets that all the artists are using these days: we could transfer a photo image like the winter tree directly to fabric, then cut it into shreds.

We talked about what to make the banners out of. Dale pointed out that if we made them out of muslin and painted them, it would be cheaper, we’d get the colors we wanted, and they’d be stiff as if starched (our other motif in MMH.)

Laura had run out of time to work on the hedgehog approximation. She left it at home, but will bring it next week.

Dale had brought in a Toast Head approximation:

The photo printout was sort of a cheesy stopgap, because he thought the sides needed to represent a stack of toast; otherwise we risked people thinking they were Bread Heads. But everyone liked the photorealistic approach. We will continue to explore that. Dale thinks the butter is too distracting; Mary Frances liked it. Mary Frances wants the chorus to be the Toast Heads, which is not an impossibility.

Mary Frances played with the Sunflower Carol Lee had re-approximated. She had some interesting new takes on things that could be done with them, including having just one sunflower per dancer/puppeteer.

We moved into discussion of the Inn: what will it look like? Marc had already posted some ideas previously on the Lacuna blog (here), and he had some sketches of Swiss Army knife-looking contraptions, which allowed various pieces of inn/set to fold out.

Dale whipped up a little model…

…based on ideas he had while daydreaming during last night’s Masterworks concert. The two square, two-leveled platforms could emerge from the wings, unfold, then walls could pop up and unfold, with perhaps a pediment flown in, etc.

Dale also talked about an idea he had based on Marc’s ideas, wherein we provide frameworks and then the walls are puppeteered in and out. He suggested that for the May 3 performance, we could have the MMH bustling “from room to room” by having the rooms move around the MMH.

Marc then built an elaborate periaktoi with all kinds of flaps and foldouts. Periaktoi…

…seen here in back view and front view (from hstech.org), are rotating triangular arrangements of flats. You paint a different scene on each face, then rotate them for changing scenery.

We thought this might be an easy way to do the Inn, at least for May 3. We’ll pursue it. Marc suggested doing the photorealism thing in a collage style, of architectural elements, not necessarily in a naturalistic manner, of course.

We have two more workshops until spring break, so we’re going to spend both of them creating the visuals for the projected version of Sun & Moon Circus. Bring your color, cut & paste supplies and play with us! You can download a PDF storyboard here.

What have I left out? Comments…

[This is cross-posted from Dale’s blog.]

Another meeting of the workshop group tonight. In attendance were me, Marc, Galen, Molly, and Kevin McInturff.

We started by discussing items we had found over the week. I had two new puppet books to show. Marc had brought in some architecture books (one of Georgian period architecture, over which I drooled.)

I realized as I pulled in to the parking lot that after I got Finale 2006 working yesterday, I should have worked on extending the sunflower waltz, since that’s what we were working on tonight. Oh well. That’s what tomorrow is for.

[Yes, I played with Finale 2006 this morning/afternoon. Everything is as it should be with GPO sounds, in fact, better than it was, since it was working fine before except for the memory issue. Now that my new laptop has 3GB of memory, Finale 2006 performs fine. I can leave Finale 2007 out of the picture for the time being.]

I had brought in a photo from the New York City Ballet of five ballerinas in a very Grecian pose (and I don’t mean “one Grecian urn.”) We mimicked those for a while and liked the look. We’re assuming that the sunflowers will be teenage dancers, since we need to choreograph them fairly specifically.

We played first with the way the troupe of sunflowers moves across the stage the other times we see them. We clumped together upstage right, then moved across the stage in little shifting spurts. “Imagine you’re Matthew Bailey,” I told them. “You keep seeking the sun, the spotlight.” Once we get real dancers in there and get them to develop a vocabulary of movement, I think it will work well.

We then entered an intense period of fluctuation: what will the sunflowers look like? We tried baby tutus on our faces as substitute sunflower heads. We had construction paper blooms in our hands. We played with extremely non-dance-like moves. We discussed ways for the troupe to arrive (probably a classical corps de ballet entrance, just swooping in.)

Who were the Two Sunflowers? We keep coming back to their being older, weary of the travel. After their duet, using canonic movement to match the music, we gave them chairs and a small table at which to rest, tea to drink, and probably the Tiger to curl up at their feet.

In the meantime, what to do with the troupe? We kept playing with the idea that tiny movements could mean a lot if you have a lot of flowers on the stage, and with the idea that all the flowers faced the sun, wherever that might be. We had my three gobo’d window projections. We had an angel bring in the ball-sun.

And then we had an idea, one of those flashes. Somebody, Marc? Kevin?, talked about making the flowers puppets, in that the dancers would have two sunflowers, one for each hand. The stems would extend to the dancers’ feet.

Very quickly, the idea took shape: tubes of green fabric, covering elastic, strapped around the dancers’ feet; cloth/flexible leaves; sunflower blooms on handles, so that the heads could rotate independently of the stems. The sunflowers could grow, shrink, turn their heads, talk to one another, and dance.

After establishing the sunflower-ness of the puppets during the duet, then we could let the dancers have more dancerish freedom during the waltz, and the audience wouldn’t think twice about sunflowers whipping about the stage.

Returning to the Two Sunflowers, we decided that the singers too could have a sunflower puppet each, and they could have a leaf that could pick up their traveling bags and teacups.

We’re very excited about the Sunflower solution.

Then we played with Man in the Marmalade Hat for a while. (See how productive we were?) We put Galen out as the MMH and encouraged him to think of fleet movement. The MMH is a change agent and is in charge of those around him. (I keep thinking Tom Bombadil, actually.)

The piece is quite complex, staging-wise-speaking. You have the MMH, his attendant ice sprites, the Squadron behind them marching, the chorus itself, the Gang from the Inn, and eventually the Hedgehogs. Each group has its own movement: tempo, style, direction, pattern. All of them end up performing the close order drill down left during the first chorus. Well, not the Hedgehogs; they do the second chorus.

After seeing me play ice sprite, Molly decided that instead of slender teen ballerinas, they should be middle-aged men. In loincloths. Painted blue. I tentatively agreed to the concept, figuring I could safely count on wearing a tux and sitting next to Nancy Willard in the audience during an actual performance.

A lot of work, and now we’re ready to start putting stuff together. Those who are interested in an assignment should head to the Lacuna/William Blake/What We Need page.