In case either of you were wanting to know why I couldn't post last week, it is because last weekend was the 2008 Pride Concert for the Orlando Gay Chorus. Steve, my husband, and I are both founding members of the chorus. We currently perform three concerts each year, and the Pride concert always ends the season. This year's Pride concert was "Come On Get Happy, Showing Our Pride." I am not going to go into how we wound up with a concert having two disparate names like that. But Steve & I were asked to write the script.
Through a series of events that I also won't go into, we wound up with a "mish-mash" of songs and were supposed to tie them together in a logical manner. Steve came up with an outline that put the selected songs in a logical order, and a skeleton draft to show how the story-line would run. But the P & P Committee didn't like the order of the songs (too many "up" songs here, and not enough here. The short version is that once they were done, any chance of a logical story went out the window.
Only way I could see to create a script at this point was to write short blurbs that described moments in gay history and tie them to a song that sort of fit the story. Yeah... very weak concept for a show, I know. So I decided to create video to help distract the audience. You know, the old "If you can't dazzle 'em with your footwork, baffle 'em with your bull-shirt." For the most part I think it worked. So basically I spent the last few weeks creating videos and locating slides to help tell the story. Last Friday, when I should've been posting a blog, I was rendering and re-rendering video in Apple's Motion and Final Cut Pro.
I created dancing letters that spelled out the show title, and had fancy generated fireworks behind them. I had footage that was taken at the display of the Names Project's AIDS Memorial Quilt, and put it behind our singing "Left Behind," a tribute to those people who've lost loved ones (by any means) and how they have to cope with being "Left Behind." Shots of Rainbow Flags behind "The Rainbow Connection." Sunbeams behind our singing the "Battle-hymn of the Republic." A slideshow featuring couples in the chorus, playing behind the last verse of "I Do" (a humorous song about gay marriage). But in many ways, I am most proud of the video I created for "Epitaph and Affirmation."
Mark Hardin, our Artistic Director, commissioned a song to honor the memory of Matthew Shepherd, the young man who was tied to a fence, beaten and left to die in Wyoming. The piece, which included sections in Latin and ran over 6 minutes in length, was quite moving on it's own. I went to iStockPhoto.com and found a picture of a Wyoming prairie with a fence in the foreground. I didn't want to use images of the actual fence where the event happened, and I wasn't trying to make anyone think that this was that image. It was just a bright and sunny image of a prairie with some hills in the background. Over the course of the song, it changed to a sunset, and the fence and prairie darkened. The sunset gave 'way to a starry night sky with a single brightly flickering star. It was very slow and subtle, and I think it added a certain sub-conscious emotion to the song.
We tried to keep the script light where we could, and serious where it needed to be. I was pleased that the audience laughed when, during the pre-show introduction, the narration took a sudden turn... "Please notice the location of the nearest exit in the unlikely event of an emergency. Should the theater suddenly lose cabin pressure, oxygen masks will descend from the ceiling. Please note that there is a ten dollar charge for one time use of any oxygen mask!" And if you've read all my postings on this blog, you will sense the familiarity.
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