audio
NASA recordings of sonified celestial objects, x-ray emissions, radio telescope, old transmissions of astronauts from space
recreations of extinct animal sounds based on fossils, such as duckbilled dinosaurs (like where they make a ceramic piece that’s based on the fossil, and actually try to have it make sound in the same way the animal would have, passing air through its nasal cavity for example, or vibrating different body parts for insects)
plant music, similar to Data Garden Quartet piece at Philidelphia Musuem of Art
music might be original composition, inspired by Beethoven Pastural using plant sonification and recreations of dinosaur sounds made from reconstructed fossils that allow recreation of the sounds they may have made (or their hearing organs to have the sounds sound the way they would to those animals), then original piece written according to Keplers Music of the Spheres, city sections would be jazz piece set at different tones and pitches to make things like car breaks, wind chimes, shoes on pavement, dogs barking, tv audio, etc able to beboped and played as notes, kind of a jazz of impromptu pieces inspired by things like Barouque pieces (Beethoven was one that came to mind due to his deafness, and then juxtoposition of hearing and deafness, but also the differences in tone and musical style from Baroque music maybe matches with a colorblind color pallet, and how did people understand the world then vs now).
pipe organ
calliope
orchestra, opera, industrial music and sounds
Agon- Stravinsky 12 tone music
Thom Willems, Forsyth Company to accompany technical dance
Eric Satie- Monotones I & II
Pierre Henry, Pierre Scheffer
Dmitri Shostakovitch, jazz, industrial
Yoko Kanno
Ben Folds Cincinatti Ballet, w/ William Shatner
mashup “We are the Daughters of Triton” w/ “My Heart Will Go On”, Belinda Carlisle Mashup Bangles, b-52s, Solos
visual
an assortment of digital art, colored lights, paper mache or other large set pieces that occasionally descend on wire: wheel of wheel chair, large speech bubble, empty but strong enough to hold a dancer who descends on it
potential use of puppets, marionets or shadow puppets on panels during the newspaper scene as well as psychologist scene, possibly hand puppets, punch and judy or muppets/ Ave Q Broadway style or both during the psychologist scene
Sabine Chaland 1979 first video ballet
Leonard Nemoy photography (and maybe poetry)
time lapse from that carnivorous plant movie from Portland State (old school blue and red 3D glasses)
costumes
for this part (kind of a jazz of impromptu pieces inspired by things like Barouque pieces Beethoven was one that came to mind due to his deafness, and then juxtoposition of hearing and deafness, but also the differences in tone and musical style from Baroque music maybe matches with a colorblind color pallet, and how did people understand the world then vs now) maybe different patterns of textiles brocades, velvets, burlaps, a brief history of someone whose ancestry is white european but their family still has a history behind it, who at somepoint maybe was viewed as something other than white, before whiteness, as a farmer or a serf, but now thats just a person walking down the street to get the newspaper, paying, and walking to read it, as the history plays out around. maybe the main character isn’t yt and you see a similar history of what its like to be asian, african, indigenous, brought somewhere, from somewhere, the clash of how one views oneself and is in the moment crashing against how others view someone, what is the societal typical vs what that has been before, what is neutral plain on a plain day doing a normal thing, what makes every moment (an example of costumes for this could possibly be found with the Oregon Ballet Theater, who did a western expansion themed ballet including Oregon trail and Lewis and Clarke to Fleet Fox music and used a lot of denim, but was still highly able to allow dancers freedom of movement).
Parade, 1917, costuming done by Pablo Picasso
and makeup- symphony pour un homme seul, les ballets de l’etoile ( Michele Signeuret)
Nicolas Georgiadis Danses Concutants 1955, Sadler’s Well Theater Company
Sadler’s Well Ballet, 1947, Checkmate featuring Beryl Grey, Philip Chetfield, and Richard Ellis (look at set and backdrop, not as much shows original costumes)
Designer Olima, inspo Yoko Kanno, Yoko Ono, David Bowie (like Darcy said, music so beautiful you want to wear it)
during the psychologist scene, body suits with Jungian diagrams as costume or makeup, in lighting maybe
set design
large set, with blank panels placed at intervals along the sides instead of curtains to be lit with digital art, crew brings out minimal set pieces: table and chair for having coffee, small chair or couch and another chair to talk with a therapist, large ramp, wheeled on and off or depending on stage design, lifted from back, with lighting changed to draw the focus elsewhere as the dancers perform and the crew changes set pieces
Parade 1917, set backdrops by Pablo Picasso
Santiago Calatrava, spring 2010 NYC ballet sets
Ernest Pignon-Ernest Cinderella 2001, les ballets de monte carlo
Paul Andreu architectural designs inspiration
Sadler’s Well Ballet, 1947, Checkmate featuring Beryl Grey, Philip Chetfield, and Richard Ellis (set and backdrop)
during the psychologist scene, body suits with Jungian diagrams as costume or makeup, in lighting and set design
that rising stage from 2000 summer Ashland Shakespeare festival, can’t remember which theater (the Globe?) like a multi layered cake, large circular base, smaller middle level, smallest top level, the stage mechanics raise it, made me think of in the middle somewhat elevated, but has that feel like scenes (shirley temple, etc) of dancing up and down levels in costume. this stage change was done relatively quickly for I think the Tempest and Life Is a Dream
choreography
person goes back and forth across stage interacting minimally with very few props (table, cup, etc) seemingly oblivious to dancers, music, and lighting changes around them
person writes in their notebook: we hear a overlap of saved auditory notes to self, snipets of advice columns, graduations speeches, day time talk show life coaching (dr. phil, wear sunscreen by baz luhrman, etc), and mircrophone from the grocery store “clean up on isle whatever”
dancers enter stage while person pauses to write, in front some pose in shapes of letters, ending on other side of stage to pose on a ramp lit in yellow huddled low as bumps on a ADA accessible ramp on the sidewalk. from above a large paper mache wheel rolls to the edge of the ramp, and floating panels are lit with canes in various fashions. Suddenly the caned panels all change to the walking man symbol, and the sounds change to the chiming a person hears at a cross walk to let them know they can walk. Person looks up, slowly posing as the walker, light in blue, and continues on. The panels change to images of people reading braille, and the dancers huddled on the ramp are spelling something out. The lighting changes quickly to a blacklight, and they jump up, and flit away, twirling in groups, to reveal that their outfits are written in different languages only revealed under the black light.
Maurice Bejart
George Balanchine- jazz, Charleston, Broadway, vaudville, opera, acrobatics, television, circus
The Four Temperments, Apollon Musagéte, Don Quixote
American Ballet Caravan w/ Lincoln Kirstein
person walks to a coffee shop and sits down to drink a cup of coffee. Interpretive dancers perform piece about the life cycle of the coffee plant, the people who grew it and shipped it, the workers who made it, as a waitress walks up and tops the coffee off (coffee is a scarf, pulled from a carafe, dropped in the cup) dancers indicate smell and steam with scarfs, both of cup of coffee and of plants, shipping exhaust, minimal, but a lot of scarfs in this section. i’ve used scarves before onstage in Bang Bang You’re Dead, a play about school violence, and in a student film called Red directed by a friend, about a woman being stalked, and in both instances scarves were very attention getting powerful images for things that could invoke multiple senses: sound and touch, smell, sight, etc.
person reads the paper, and a more strictly classical ballet, political theater performs, and is cut short as dancers scatter, cutting a classical music piece off as he turns the page and folds the paper up, they enter in a kind of unfolding like people cut from a folded up piece of paper, and dance in versions of power suits
person walks in the park, sitting on a bench, watching the birds, dancers who dart and flit at one another. Some are song birds, crows on the edges, behaving playfully in a group, pigeon dancers gather in close. dancers dance to recreations of extinct dinosaur sounds based on fossils, put onto a keyboard, and played as a seasonal music piece, maybe about spring, as well as sonifications of plant sounds
person sits in chair across from another person who dances in and sits across from them. a speech bubble with a dancer inside descends, and the person motions and mouths, as clips from daytime tv, jung, advice given at weddings, etc play, and the dancer climbs out of the speech bubble, and other dancers from earlier join the dancer standing behind them causing them to puppet, or them standing behind and puppeting. dancers in this section use the ramp again to form a pyramid shape, as panels display depictions of wants and needs: notes from a psychology class, norman rockwell painting of a meal, an advertisement for a sex shop; homage to maslow, until the dancer in the chair across from the person has a bell that dings, and all the dancers dance off stage leaving the person to walk away towards a tree and a bench
lights begin to dim, and the panels light up to show nightscapes over city on the foremost panels, NASA images in the further panels, lit in blue, purple, blacklights and teal, dancers act as planets, revolving around one another and their moons, their costumes may drastically change visibility from one light to the next (or make up) , the panels change to molecules, and subatomic particles, and dancers change between individual and multiple partners, as quarks, protons, electron shells, covalent bonds, music is sonification of NASA images and radio telescope data set to Music of the Spheres composition (Kepler). the person leans relaxed and looks up at the sky. https://www.musicofthespheres.net/kepler/
In The Middle, Somewhat Elevated, Impressing the Czar, Artifact: dancers limbs posing often in excess of 180 degrees, shifting from vertical axis, William Forsythe, technical pieces accompanied by industrial music and sounds, Sylvie Guillem Tribute to Versace
Frederic Ashton-Monotones I & II
Jean-Christoph Maillot
Additional notes from Vivian Durante’s book Ballet
fencing footwork, non-traditional step left, step right movements
Ocean Piece
krill- bigger and smaller by movements, somewhat erratic, fluttery, clear silvery, things drawn towards, drawn towards large cetaceans in groups but otherwise don’t move in groups
herring- moving together, slim, long, silvery, light catching, balled up solo on cedar boughs for duet, then all together in the deep blue void of ocean, hunted
salmon- going and coming back, struggle, beauty, sustenance, collective life
seals- graceful, fast, one and two, teaching, playing
cephalopods- parents, builders, hunter gathers, cave dwellers
large cetaceans- slow rise and fall, breathe in and out, movement, family
orcas- duality, up and down, fast and slow, play and survival, old and young
kelp- secured but free to move, floating but heavy, complimenting a seals grace
cedar boughs- caught together or tangled in kelp, a roof, a nest for tiny eggs,erraticly placed, washing here and there, graceless, floating on tides and jams, seal and bird homes, cradling, comforting, balance beam
Storyteller Doll 