Stage direction ideas | notes                    7/5/09 summary

- Many chairs on stage for Waiting. Extras looking at watches, cell phones, PDA's with anticipation.

One person starts the chain of actions, standing, walking to another seated extra and placing a hand on their shoulder. This person, in turn, stands and approaches another extra and the chain continues until the stage is clear of extras. Do they take their chairs with them after they touch the shoulder? Do the chairs remain as constant props that get repositioned? Is this like a "waiting room"? Is this the persistent motif? It works with the poems - the indeterminate space between waking and sleeping, action and inaction, leaving and arriving, … The last to enact this gesture is the second principal putting his hand on the first principal's shoulder. She doesn't respond as if he is invisible, like a spiritual gesture, "dream agent" or guide.

The video on 3 screens simultaneously shows a hand placed on the shoulder. Shoot multiple people's hands on multiple shoulders, Futurist gesture multiplied like Bala's dog leash/leg motion

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- a projector stationed on a swivel chair. Stage hand walks to the chair, picks up the projector, sits down and points the projector, then spins slowly to project the image 270º around the stage and through the audience and back. Then stands, replaces the projector and exits. Maybe begins Eye Mask? interstitial section?. Another motorized projector later, makes a similar sweep. A kind of mimicking gesture during with Eyes in the Back of Our Head. The image this time may be of two lights, like headlights of a car, reversing the position of the audience from inside (seeing the window sash shape) to outside (seeing the source of that illusion/light).

- "love seat" for the Marriage? OR designed like the media divan. OR is it the media divan reconfigured?… This would be equipped with cameras on goose neck fixtures for the interactive blur filter effect. The principals maybe singing with (hacked) cell phones (using the light only).

- Interstitial between Marriage >> Leaving Forever. Upper left screen has single rotating rock like the moon in the Rain. Fades up and crossfades with stone perspective sequence on upper right screen into the mountain/house/yarn, sequence…

- Remote singing in the Absence - 3 camera angles on three screens. (similar to the hands-on-shoulder perspectives for Waiting). OR pre-recorded and obviously out of sync/delayed.

- reverse text? WITH | HTIW spins and plays in reverse (I've forgotten where to use this)

- Architects drawings, street maps as 1) video projections 2) gobos on floor and on audience

- Footsteps - white throw blanket (translucent) draped over media divan glowing ultraviolent light from beneath from the media divan screens. This is a two-piece blanket half white and half black silk. The black half is bunched up on the floor in front of media divan and not visible from the start. The white fabric slowly gets brighter as the principal crosses stage to media divan and sits… She slowly pulls the blanket over her shoulder changing the white to black and lies down facing the audience covered in the black approaching Eye Mask. This fabric must be very light and the gesture effortless.

- The Offender - "reader" speaks text (voice processed, accompanied by other sounds?) in dialogue with text-on--screen. The voice and text in dialogue, each completing the other's lines. Maybe the spinning stone ever-present on-screen (upper left).

- The Absence - Principal lying on divan facing the upper left screen, back to audience. On the screen a slow-mo shot of a woman in a hammock at night or in a studio. It's lit in a way that it comes in and out of the light as it swings. The text of the Absence, is the typewritten page on the two vertical screens. The text is revealed by an animated spotlight, (or actual footage of a penlight illuminating the page) not quite like the "follow-the-bouncing-ball" cartoon technique, but like a searchlight/flashlight or the moon in the sky (would it be possible to have the flashlight beam become the moon very subtley, barely recognizable as a keyframed motion path, keying the text through it? Or would that become cheesy? Finesse, please.

7/5/09 afternoon

- Intro/Prelude/Overture - Does the "chorus" (extras) position chairs on the empty set (save the media divan) as the piece begins? Is this a duet with violin/cello that starts to emerge as Footprints? Or is it a solo for prepared/muted/dampened piano and processed?

- Eye Mask - in lieu of the silk on the face, does the text crawl across the screen as topography of a face? Or a video of projected text over closed eyes? Or over a gutter of an opened book?

- with Eyes at the Back of our Head  - Could this be read by the "chorus" (extras). The poem's use of the collective "we" seems to suggest a "pair" or could infer "the many". Could specific lines be read by the principals in unison with a chorus member as highlights of the text?

- The Charge - The closing lines "…make my image. Let be what is gone" passes along a strand of yarn (that used in the house wrap image) across the 3 media divan monitors. The "let be what is gone" loops and fades…
"let be what is gone let be what is gone let be what is gone" the tracking of the type slowly converges to be one contiunuous solid line and transforms into an erasure or redacted text.

letbewhatisgoneletbewhatisgoneletbewhatisgoneletbewhatisgoneletbewhatis

…and becomes a key source for another image? Or does it start as text and the yarn gets keyed into the text as it becomes solid? And/Or do the poems appear as the original written pages on the projected screens overlaying over themselves gradually and redact themselves to become an image instead of language? (as in, make my image. Let be what is gone)