Wings

I saw Alex last night and he started talking about plaits and fabric for Icarus costumes. I realized that I have not even begun to think about costumes. This is always a tricky aspect of the development of a piece. Costumes represent character and place or mood. They want to reinforce the heart of a dance. I often don't know what that heart is until late in the process, but the costumes, a time-consuming stage element, need to be embarked upon early on. There's a lot of guess work involved.

I have always envisioned blue for the Daedalus figures: the uniform blue of airline pilot jackets. This signifies the status and responsibility of Daedalus, the father, the creator of the plan upon which he and his son act. Blue represents the terrible weight of a pilot's duties: she stands between her passengers and all of that open sky underneath their feet. A pilot is only as good as his materials, however, and cannot prevent wax from melting in hot sun. Similarly, Daedalus may feel responsible for Icarus's death, but the boy was wearing the wings.

Amanda, our Icarus, may wear baggy pants and T-shirt, a passenger's clothes. But I like Alex's idea of wings, or maybe a single wing stitched onto her costume. She is the passenger, but also the pilot. Amanda flies her plane into the sun until it stalls and she falls into the ocean.

So many of the elements appear here: they fly through the air, Icarus is singed by flame, then he plunges into water. Earth is the element which I cannot, however, ignore. My dancers ground themselves in order to lift Amanda. Amanda flies from anchor to anchor. It is like a bird dance performed by creatures of mud. Yet this shows the struggle of flight: freedom is a burden, difficult to achieve, impossible to hold forever.

Come join Human Landscape Dance for the premiere of Icarus and Daedalus at the Kennedy Center Millenium Stage on Wednesday March 23, 2011 at 6pm, free. If you like the work, come perform in it by signing up for my repertory class at Dance Place, Wednesdays from 7:45pm to 9:30, May 4, 2011 to July 6. This class will perform with us in the Washington DC/Philadelphia Exchange at Dance Place, Saturday July 9, 2011 at 8pm and Sunday July 10 at 7pm, a shared concert with Philadelphia dance goddess Anne-Marie Mulgrew and her dancers. This is the second half of our exchange with Mulgrew's group, which began in our Philadelphia performance in May, 2010.

Photo by Jennifer Mueller.