THE RITE OF SPRING

I love to work with music, so this project was a treat. I must thank my ex-husband Reid Anderson and his band The Bad Plus for hiring me and Noah Hutton with no previous experience in the matter!!

Well, that´s not true. We actually did the band´s EPK, which they loved. I had all the footage with so many different cameras and by chance I met Noah at one of their concerts. We immediately hit it off. He had all the professional film experience I was lacking 😊 So I asked him if he would like to help me edit it! He is a fan of the band, so he loved the invite.

Our EPK (I need to find it! And put it in the web site as well) was a success 😊 And so we got this major gig. The band knew we were cheap and good. As Reid said, "I knew I did not have to worry about it."

And worry he did not! I should say almost “care” 😊 Which is the best client you can dream of. We could do whatever we wanted as long as it was amazing, and we didn´t bother him.

It was amazing indeed!

I thought of it as an architecture project, after the research phase (I read all the books I could muster on Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring), we started with a diagram. Or I started it. Noah at first was very polite but I don´t think you do diagrams in filmmaking. And why not? They are so helpful. Noah was losing patience. I finished it alone 😊

But it was so helpful for me. I needed to translate the narrative of the music into energy and concrete moments. Well, I needed to understand the music, basically. Stravinsky is not your beginner´s level precisely.

We were sure of two things, we wanted a dancer for the Sacrificial Dance, (“the chosen one”) as Nijinsky choreographed it for the Paris premiere in 1913 and we wanted to go shoot some nature, as the real Spring was really approaching.

These two events got Noah busy, while I kept working on the diagram 😊

We went to the Catskills for a weekend, and on Saturday (still winter) there was a snowstorm. So, we went out to shoot a storm, basically. Luckily the following day a big sun came out and things started to melt a little. We shot for hours, running up and down the hills like little savages. We have hours of footage we never used.

Cause Noah had this black box – like a camera obscura – you place it in front of the lens and creates like a little room with the image projected at the end. He tried it just a little bit, but enough (barely) for the 4 minutes or so the opening lasts.

It was perfect for the opening piece of the first movement, where the band was not playing live, but a recording Reid had done mixing the guys playing in his 90s analog synthesizers with very subdued weird sound stuff. So, we were projecting that little movie, of the camera obscura, on a scrim with the guys in the dark behind it, ready to start playing when this introduction ended.

The scrim, which was not always so easy to have (depending on the venue) was so important, for the movie is projected on the proscenium, while hiding the musicians behind it. As the scrim goes up the sun in our camera obscura turns into a full screen sun projected in the back of the stage, which is as if we, together with the audience, entered inside this little story of the Spring the musicians are about to tell.  

Julie did learn the original Nijinsky´s choreography! Which was so beautiful. I am adding here rehearsal footage for you to see. She made it happen, really. Julie was the first dancer at the Mark Morris Dance Group where she had been since her teens almost. She was friends with the band for years, as Ethan Iverson, had been for many years Mark Morris´ piano player for the company. She had already danced for a Milton Babet video clip for The Plus. So for us it was a no brainer. The first thing that I thought of was: JULIE WORDEN. Not only she is an amazing dancer and a super gorgeous woman, but she is such an intelligent and wonderful human being to be around with. Thank you Julie !!

Thanks to “our” diagram we were able to place all the footage for each segment. After the introduction there are a lot of abstract material inspired in Russian Suprematism and different types of Spring moments (we did use some other footage of our trips to the Catskills and some Arab Spring footage as well all out of focus). I did some very cheap animations on Flash that worked out pretty well.

We decided to use color, à la Robert Wilson (if you are going to copy, copy the best), which is very Russian supremacist too and because I love color. I had seen several Wilson´s shows and I love his scenic design. And mixing the abstract films with solid monochrome backgrounds just worked. You did not want noise all the time behind the musicians.

Once Julie enters the scene, she takes the lead of the performance. It was very difficult to sync her dance exactly to the music. I did not say this before but me and Noah were also playing live the videos!! We had bought this 3D mapping software in order to be able to VJ our work in sync with the music, which was changing a little with the live performance.

Julie was disappointed when she saw it 😊 It seems we did a poor job transposing her dance exactly. But I have to say that it did look synced and worked great.

I have rarely been so nervous about anything in my life (besides singing in a rock band, where I literally lost my voice couple times before going out). Life performance is nerve racking. But we nailed it every time. Unfortunately the nerves are part of it.

I love going on tour 😊