[cross-posted from Dale’s blog]
At noon I went to meet with the Newnan Cultural Arts Commission to offer the proposal for William Blake’s Inn. Everyone was supportive and excited. They decided to sponsor the May 3 performance and to begin looking at finding funding for the entire project, so that’s exciting. (You can download a PDF version of the prospectus.)
We had workshop tonight again. Tonight we worked with Denise Johnson on Two Sunflowers. Melissa is stepping in for Ginny, who will be out of pocket in the days before the performance. (Grayson has to come home from college or something.) We played with the four sunflowers Carol Lee provided and got the Two Sunflowers’ part all blocked out.
We went back over Man in the Marmalade Hat and plugged Denise into that. Then after she left we played more with the Sunflower Waltz. We got the beginning blocked out, but it has become very clear that the big, big parts of the waltz can’t be worked out through focus on the movements of individual sunflowers. We will have to use the masses of sunflowers and their movements to make sense of the music. Somebody should have thought of that before they let me write all that huge ballet music.
We’re moving into a new phase, less brainstorming and more implementation. It’s harder work.
In other news, Marc has been playing with ArtRage and has produced the following images:
Striking, a beautiful use of the program.
At the British Library’s website there is an online tour through one of Blake’s notebooks. It’s worth a visit:
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/digitisation.html
I’ve had a design concept idea emerge from looking at the notebooks and thinking about Dale’s wish for giant sheets extending from the upstage heavens down and out upon the floor, creating a curved line connecting “heaven and earth” instead of a hard angle.
So imagine the PAC curtains closed. The audience sees sheets extending out underneath the foot of the curtains, onto the “thrust” and on over the lip of the stage onto the auditorium floor (a slight rake to the thrust floor perhaps). The sheets are from Blake’s notebook, browning and aged. We can read his scribbling, some snatches of verse (perhaps some Willard in the mix), some sketches of angels, suns, our tyger, the king of cats, the cow, the car, etc. And as the audience’s gaze moves to the foot of the curtain, perhaps the beginnings of some architectural design sketches.
When the curtains open, the sheets extend back, covering the entirety of the stage floor. It is covered with more of Blake’s scribblings and more precisely rendered architectural illustrations for “the Inn.” As the sheets continue on toward upstage and begin, in fact, to continue up into the heavens, the Inn is rendered to scale as the Inn proper (becoming essentially the “backdrop,” with the drawn windows opening onto some vista beyond the sheet’s surface. Above the turrets of the drawn Inn we see fanciful astronomical sketches of the sky. The sheets become translucent scrim at this point to allow the audience to have a view of a full sky beyond and through the sheet. As if the sheet finally merges into the heavens at the very top of the audience’s view.
There could be two sheets to allow for a mid-stage upstage entrance. Or the sheet could be torn in two (Blake would approve of the subtle Biblical allusion to the tearing of the “temple curtain”).