Workshop, 4/18 (Day 258/365)

Posted on by Dale

In attendance: Dale, Marc, Mary Frances, Molley, Laura, Melissa, and Carol Lee. We also had MMH Galen, Toast Head Maggie and Hedgehogs Taylor, Kennedy, Chiara, Preston, and Travis.

First up were the Hedgehogs. Heavens to betsy, are these cute critters!

This last one is of us all double-checking what hedgehog ears look like on my laptop. We decided to try knit caps with ears and noses attached to them, over their eggshell foam.

We worked bit by bit, starting with the hedgehog choreography and working our way backwards through the song. Eventually we added some “walls” and a fireplace for the hedgehogs to come bursting out of. We added Toast Heads. We added the Gang. I think it’s all going to be very merry, especially if we can get the Gang to the level that they actually look precise.

The hedgehogs are not very precise. We’ll work on that, but of course that is not the point. They’re there for cuteness.

They were troupers: they focused on what we needed to focus on, they hit their marks more often than not, and I think by the time we get to May 3, they’re going to be absolutely awesome.

After we sent them home, then we worked on Toast Head choreography. That was a lot shorter. In fact, it surprised me how little time it took to get that done. Of course, it takes forever to develop the choreography; transferring to real dancers (like Molly and Maggie) takes no time at all.

Finally, Galen arrived from his Music Man rehearsal, and we worked on the Marmalade Man’s stuff. I chatted a bit about how I had come to view the MM as a disruptive force in the Inn: he shows up, and things just get stirred up. He has that power, to straighten roads, to command the Gang to fall in for close order drill, to summon up hedgehogs, to change winter to spring. And yet when he’s done, things are better.

It’s sort of like Wallace Stevens’ image of the creative mind/act as a garden: sometimes you have to scrape it clean and start over. That’s the function of the MM, to make us all reexamine the status quo.

This is reflected in his choreography, all free and light and arms and legs and entrechats, while his Toast Heads are starched flat and the Gang marches in order.

Finally we tried to put it all together. It may be too much, but we’ll see next week.

Jonathan Hickman was there, shooting video for a small documentary/trailer for the May 3 thing. This is good.

In other news, I met with Don Nixon at the Centre, and he’s on board for the 2008 premiere. There’s some exciting stuff going on out there, folks.

Also, Ginny got the invitations printed, folded, and stuffed. Excelsior!

Workshop, 4/17 (Day 257/365)

Posted on by Dale

Another workshop night, again an intensive rehearsal kind of thing. Dale, Marc, Carol Lee, Melissa, and Denise in attendance, with Mary Frances joining us later.

Carol Lee had finished the sunflowers, so we were able to work on getting the sunflower waltz shaped up.

Dance is funny to write about, because we followed the same process of successive approximation we’ve always followed, but it’s all movement instead of drawings and discussion. I mean, I can say that we backed up the Big Bang and replicated it above the Two Sunflowers with the Field of Flowers, but is any of that going to make sense?

Or that we cut the second run across from the inverted V and went straight into the Field of Flowers? Or that we didn’t have time for the weave-through heading into the Tableau, so we just did the Big Bang, one waltz turn, and then ran into a pas de chat and spiked the Tableau?

See what I mean?

Eventually, we snagged Molly Honea and two dancer friends, so we had five dancers and ten sunflowers. We laid our choreography on them and lo, it worked! Super cool!

I had to come home and write it all down before I forgot.

Problems with the invitation: we just can’t get the screened sunflower right, and now we have 500 invitations that cannot be read. ::sigh::

Marmalade Man (Day 256/365)

Posted on by Dale

Normally, Monday’s a bust and I have to claim Masterworks as my creativity, but I got some things done today.

I got the invitation for the backers audition done and took it to the printers. Unfortunately, their copier is not picking up the subtler bits of the sunflower I screened in behind the type. So I have to get that done again tomorrow.

I got Man in the Marmalade Hat notated in my storyboard Moleskine. Good thing, too, because as we get into the second verse, things turn very complicated onstage. I will be glad Wednesday night when I have a small horde of hedgehogs that I know exactly where everybody needs to be every single measure in the music.

The only question I have about our choreography is whether to bring the Gang back in for the close-order drill. I think it would be wonderful to have them doing their close-order drill, surrounded by hedgehogs who are not.

This afternoon, I got two CDs that I forgot I had ordered. No wonder, since they came from Germany and took a long time to get here. They’re from the same man who wrote Höfische Tänze, the book I used back at UGA to research most of the dances we did in the Period Dance Group. Some of them are to accompany the dances in the book, but many are new and different. One CD is Historische Tänze, von der Volte zum Galopp, and the other is Höfische Tänze/Alte Kontratänze aus England. That second one has instructions for the contradanses, so I can tell that I’m going to be brushing up on my German next month as I get ready for period dance lessons at GHP.

More craft, and some art (Day 254/365)

Posted on by Dale

The only thing of value I accomplished today was to nail down the layout of the invitation for the backers audition. Some of that was creative, in that I used ArtRage to sketch out a good-looking sunflower to screen in behind the invitation. But the stem and flowers were really crappy looking, no matter what tool I used. The other problem was that ArtRage doesn’t seem to export transparency, even though that’s what the little checkerboards stand for in its layers.

I lost patience and used clip art instead, manipulating it in Illustrator. It doesn’t look bad at all, especially at 35% opacity behind the text. So that’s done. If only my Epson 1520 still responded to my Intel MacBook. Don’t know what that’s about, and I didn’t have time to figure it out. I’ll print it out on the big printer at school on Monday.

Most of the day we spent in Atlanta. We got tickets to the 2:00 admission of the new Louvre exhibit at the High Museum, and drove up for that. This was a special event, because I had emailed all the people on my “we need to get together” list, Atlanta edition, and suggested we do the High then go out for drinks and dinner.

The Louvre exhibit was gorgeous, as usual, and for me, exhausting: any single object (and these were decorative things) in the exhibit represents more concentrated design and execution that I can imagine. One caveat for everyone: as the Louvre exhibit changes, be aware that only the second floor changes. The first floor is still the display of busts, and the third floor is still the paintings collected by the three Louis’s. A bit of a rip-off, but if you know that going in, I think most of us can deal with it.

We made it to some of the other exhibits this time, including a “Romantic Vision” exhibit of drawings from the Romantic period, and yes, there was one William Blake in the exhibit. Not a very outstanding one, but there it was.

Drinks and dinner were fabulous fun. Carol Rogers “Roget” Reiser, whom I don’t think I’ve seen in 30 years, was there, and we had a good time catching up. Stella Lang and her husband Charlie came for drinks, but then had to skip out for a gala in support of the Museum of Contemporary Art. They were in good spirits. And Rick and Rebecca Rakosczy joined us for drinks and dinner, and we had a good time sharing clueless-college-age-children stories.

All in all a good evening. I feel sure that I shall absolutely without question get Make Way finished tomorrow. I just know it.

Craft (Day 253/365)

Posted on by Dale

I had hoped to get further into Make Way tonight, but I got sucked into a social engagement that I should have declined. Good friends, good times, but at some point the work has to be done.

At least I did get the official invitation to the backers audition mocked up in InDesign. It needs its explanatory copy and a sunflower graphic, and then I can get it printed and into the hands of the members of the Cultural Arts Commission.

So I crafted today; no art.

Make Way (Day 252/365)

Posted on by Dale

So tonight, finally, I had an evening clear, and I chained myself to my computer. It seems to have worked.

I got the Wise Cow’s first verse scored, pulling back on the waltz chorus so that it plays against the expansive nature of the theme, building a little suspense. Again, I find that cutting back on the orchestration is very effective.

I was able to take the old flute/oboe combo for the Rabbit’s part of the verse and reinstate it for the second verse. Likewise, for the Wise Cow’s part, and for her waltz chorus, I added a little more to the mix. It may be too much, but by now I’m used to paring everything away when I need to.

My goal was to make it to the timpani roll and trumpet fanfare of the third verse, and I did. I held the trumpets in reserve for that moment, and I think it’s going to be lots of fun. I stopped there, but I’ll flesh out that part tomorrow night.

It’s the big finish that will take the most time now. The Wise Cow’s verse will be all pure, shimmery strings, then the waltz chorus will be tutti all the way. Expect harp glissandi.

In other news, the shakedown from the Cultural Arts Commission meeting continues to play out: further meetings, guest lists, etc. By May 3, we should be pretty much prepared to move forward. It’s too exciting.

Workshop, 4/11 (Day 251/365)

Posted on by Dale

Lots of creativity today. I finished the kindergarten video, and it turned out pretty cute, although to my semi-trained eye there are way too many things wrong with it to make it actually useful. But the untrained were entertained.

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.

Workshop, 4/10 (Day 250/365)

Posted on by Dale

Back to work at the workshop! Dale, Marc, Laura, Carol Lee, and Melissa in attendance.

Dale and Carol Lee shared their autographed copies of A Visit to William Blake’s Inn, plus other fun stuff from New York. Dale talked about the meeting of the Cultural Arts Commission tomorrow and some of the ins and outs of getting ready for the backers auditions.

Our schedule called for us to work with members of the octet on their role for the May 3 performance. None showed up. Ginny did, but she was still dressed for work, and since Denise will be dropping by tomorrow night, we sent her home.

We decided instead to choreograph Man in the Marmalade Hat from start to finish. We worked on movement for the ToastHeads, and choreographed their movement onto the stage. We coordinated that with the ice sprites and left space for the MMH. (Galen will be in tomorrow night.)

We then switched to the Gang and their role in the piece, their close order drill. We had choreographed it before, but basically we had to reconstruct it.

Now it’s all written down, on our wall-size chart of the lyrics of the piece.

Before we left, Dale read through the prospectus he’s prepared for the Arts Commission. We discussed some kind of ideas for budget. We are having some phenomenal ideas, and it would be a shame to see them fall short because of a lack of funding. But all the indicators are that forces are lining up that will make it all possible.

Before I went to workshop, I pulled up Make Way and took a different tack with it. I had forced myself to hear the piece in my head and listen to what I was hearing. I was hearing “lighter,” so I stripped out the flute/oboe combo for the opening melody and gave it to a solo violin. As it happens, the “Strad” violin sound is pretty whiny, but you gotta hear it under lights, so to speak. I think it will work.

Editing (Day 249/365)

Posted on by Dale

This afternoon, after the power went out at school, I tinkered with the first eight measures or so of Make Way. (Laptops run on batteries when the power goes out. It’s a beautiful thing.) I think I’ve got it bearable.

My intention was to work on the next eight measures tonight, but after I got upstairs and sat down, there was an email from Mike Funt. Not only is he getting married in Las Vegas on a Monday in two weeks, preventing my attendance, he has the nerve to send me a script for House he wrote upon an agent’s request for a sample hour-long script. Well, it’s not so much the sending as the asking me to look it over that takes nerve.

First of all, of course, do I look like a script doctor to you? Am I sitting in That House in L.A., overlooking the Valley, cocktail in hand, multiple Emmys on the glass bookshelf behind me, as I look out at the lights of the city twinkle on below in the purple sunset? Is there a buxom starlet in the pool? Is she nude? Is there a pool? (No, no, and no.) Feh.

Second of all, there is no second of all. I’m still stuck on the first of all: why would Mike Funt, who is clearly talented and headed for great things, think I knew enough to do anything but correct his spelling? Which I did, needless to say.

Very flattering, to be sure, but nothing throws one into a panic as being thought of as competent in fields one knows nothing about. My tirade about the Pirate Queen does not count; any idiot could have done that, except, apparently, for Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schönberg, Richard Maltby, Frank Galati, and Graciela Daniele.

Oh well, I’ll work on the music Thursday and Friday.