Tranquillo: a beginning

My Ten Little Waltzes will have its premiere as the accompaniment for a dance piece for the entire company of Southern Arc Dance Theatre the last weekend in March. One of the groups involved is Southern Arc’s Dance Without Limits class, which is for people with special needs — they will be performing to “3. Tranquillo,” and I have been invited to work with these dancers on their dance. (I am very thrilled to do so!)

First, the music:

If you clicked on that first link up there, you may have read that I had a vague idea of using scarves or ribbons as the gimmick. Since then I’ve had a few more ideas — which we’ll have to try and adapt as we work on the piece — but the idea of silken scarves stuck with me.

I contacted my friend Jennifer Schottstaedt, costumer extraordinaire, for advice on the idea. She replied immediately with a long email full of suggestions, advice, and links to sources. She’s a goddess. (I met Jennifer when we hired her to teach at the Governor’s Honors Program.)

So I ordered some white rayon “chinese silk” and made my plans.

First I cut the four yards in half, then cut each half into four strips. Those seemed too wide to achieve the floatiness I had imagined, so I cut four of the strips in half. Now I had eight “scarves.”

I decided to add a wooden dowel “handle” to each one, and that’s what this post is about. First I measured the width.

I decamped to the back yard to cut short pieces of 1” dowel to serve as handles.

Our basement room was formerly a playroom and sometime sewing room, but now it’s a storage unit and not as organized as it was when I sewed ten football fields of thread into muslin walls for the labyrinth for my burn camp, 3 Old Men.

3 Old Men at alchemy in 2023

The point is that I had to move some stuff around before I could even begin. Fortunately, Cecil the Pest™was helping as well as he knew how.

Specifically, he insisted on sitting on whatever I needed to pick up next.

The actual sewing was not too hard, give or take the uncooperative nature of rayon. I sewed one edge of the tube closed, then across the top…

…inserted a dowel…

…and stitched the tube closed.

I wondered if perhaps I should paint the dowels black, thinking they might be easier to see if our dancers needed to toss their scarves into the air and then catch them. Since it’s too cold to be applying paint outside, I made a tube of art paper…

… and inserted the dowel into that.

SIDEBAR: “Siri, what is the circumference of a circle with a one inch diameter?” … 3.14 inches. Duh.

My perception, though, was that the dark color actually made the dowel less visible.

After sewing the handle into its tube, I took my ABORTIVE ATTEMPT out to the labyrinth to play with it. I tried to get a photo of it when I tossed it into the air, but that’s kind of hard to do with only two hands.

I promise I’ll have a lot more photos of the things in action once we begin working with the dancers.

Cecil continued to assist.

He eventually resorted to chomping on my sleeve in frustration, claiming that my attempts to move him off the fabric were an infringement of his personal liberties.

After a relatively short time, I was done:

Eight weighted rayon scarves, ready for what I think is going to be an absolute showstopper, Mar 28 & 29, here in Newnan. (Ten Little Waltzes is the first half of the program.)

Get your tickets here.