Laura and I had a fun and productive meeting. Laura began by demonstrating some ideas for sunflower choreography and then sketched out a possible staging for “Two Sunflowers” involving an upstage raised area for young sunflowers, a middle area containing dancers, and the singers farther downstage. We played a bit with the presence of windows in the piece, sketching out, based on Laura’s suggestion, a vision of the singers looking out through windows toward the audience as they sing.
Laura’s interest in windows let me seize the opportunity to talk about preoccupations I’d been sketching out earlier that day. I know it’s a little conceptual at this point and has more to do with general staging than envisioning particular songs, but: two sources of light and two kinds of “portals” in our piece–hearths and windows. Two kinds of light, two kinds of energy, two frames for visions. I’ve played a bit with four-sided, rotating hearth and window units which could move freely about the stage. At one point I thought about animal masks hanging within the hearths, brought out by children when the time is right. Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Laura and I played with the idea of window and hearth frames rising and descending between the floor and a raised level. We both were struck by the notion of floating hearths.
Laura went back to an idea we had discussed last time and imagined one of the children placing an umbrella on the back of a turtle that was missing a shell. She suggested the children using other objects in similar substituting ways throughout.
We imagined all the “beasts” of the Inn being represented by large masks and a group of children dressed in colors evoking that beast. The children would move collectively to convey the bodies of the beasts, holding up the mask as the head. Laura also suggested a “Chinese Dragon” style of representing the creatures, with children moving beneath cloth which extends behind each mask. She also proposed a deliberate “international” style of theatre craft for our work, blending different kinds of puppetry and story-telling from around the world.
We used large sheets of paper and markers to make sketches of all the ideas we discussed and competed to see who could render the most wretched drawings. It was very liberating.
And we ended by touching upon the question: interior or exterior? Do we use our stage space in a more open fashion in which we incorporate a strong horizon line or do we consciously create an interior stage world? Or neither? Discuss?
Here’s what I thought of over the weekend, and it’s in the same space as you guys:
Three gobos of window light, cross-fading from one to the other during the Sunflower Waltz; the sunflowers keep their faces turned toward the light as they “count the steps of the sun.”
Like this:
I think next week we ought to play with movement for the sunflowers. For some reason, I am resisting a ballet vocabulary in my head. I’d like to see what we come up with using that restriction.
I also had some visions re: hedgehog choreography.