wilnap

We were driving around Durham and I knew what I wanted; a lawn mower.

I figured it was possible to find a used reel lawn mower there. We passed a dilapidated what house with every manner of thing hanging off the front porch. I suppose there must have been a sign somewhere that stated it was an “antiques”  store. But it was really every kind of worn out rick-rack you might find in a southern home.

We went in there, I think that it was Jane, I and Aaron? We were met by a southern guy. When I asked if he had any of those old style lawn mowers he said follow me out back. Behind the house was a totally overgrown lawn and two chained up dogs. Who immediately started to bark at me when we came out. The proprietor said “I’ll hold the dogs you look in that tuft of grass over there.” I went over and dug around in a completely overgrown pile of metal objects until I came upon what felt like a handle. I pulled it up and sure enough it was a reel push style lawn mover. “$25 dollars” he said. We stuffed it into the car and returned to the venue.

When we got there I mowed the area around the dock. I worked pretty well. I think there is a photo.

This was the first performance day at ADF. We were premiering a revival of Native Green, a lovely bucolic piece. But what I really remember was that we were performing Way Station a piece with large sculptures by artist Robert Long. They were quite large, when we went over seas they required their own container. But we just fit them into a Janco trailer to go to Durham.

The stage of Paige auditorium is quite small although the hall has a ton of seats. So we arranged to leave the truck trailer at the loading dock which was right off stage right, not 15′ from the SR edge of the proscenium. We were also doing RainForest which has a ton of helium filled balloons by Andy Wahrhol. The stage had storage room for neither the balloons nor the sculptures. So we stored them in the trailer. But because of the show order we had to first put the Sculpture on the stage and leave the balloons in the trailer, then put both the balloons and the sculptures in the trailer and lastly put the balloons on the stage. So the first intermission was a process of pulling the balloons out of the trailer, putting them aside on the stage, then putting the sculptures in the nose of the trailer then putting the balloons back on the trailer ready to be placed during the second intermission.

Way Station

We had a plan for this. But what we didn’t plan for was that Merce would be sitting on the stage in his red folding chair in the place where we planned to park the balloons. It turned out there really was nowhere else we could easily put them and Merce found it difficult at his age to get in and out of the chair. So, with his permission, we piled the balloons all around him, basically burying him as we loaded the sculptures and then unburied him as we put the balloons back in the trailer. RainForest