Megan and Murray McMillan

In this image we’re adjusting the choreography and lighting. If you look closely, you can see how we’ve designed the landscape to slide open–there is a channel that goes directly through to the performer stage (see the image on the previous post).

Here is the final set, with the angle of the landscape and performer stage corrected. When seen from the front, this trick becomes invisible.

We’ve now hung the landscape, but when we looked through the camera, the perspective looks wrong. Because the top stage (where one performer will be) and the landscape are parallel to each other, the camera can’t see either one well. Time to re-build. We’ll remove both the stage and the landscape and refabricate both at a slope towards the camera [so if seen from the side, they will create a wedge].

Here’s the finished (Finnish) landscape, ready to be mounted on the platform.

Last night we went to a performance of the two dancers, Nina Renvall and Janne Kilpiö, who will be in the video we’re shooting tomorrow. It was a lovely, funny and absurd improvisational dance performance on a stage covered completely with greenery, weeds, and other plant-life taken from nature. Part Buster Keaton, part Pina Baush.

We’re lucky to have found performers whose sensibilities are so in sync with our own.

We’re creating a contour “map” of a landscape that references the Åland Archipelago that stretches between Finland and Sweden in the Baltic Sea. Like all of Finland, the archipelago is in the midst of “The Great Uplift” – a post-glacial rebound where land masses that were depressed by the huge weight of ice sheets during the last glacial period are rising due to ice melt.

“According to the isostatic theory, land uplift reduces gravity. In Finland the connection between land uplift and gravity has been studied with high precision gravity measurements over the past 18 years. The results show that, although there are significant variations in gravity, the variations are not linear with the time but rather periodic ones.” -from “Finnish measurements of the Fennoscandian land uplift gravity lines in Finland 1966-1984,” by A. Kiviniemi of the Geodetic Inst., Helsinki [link].

Because of global climate change, the low-lying archipelago is in a neck-and-neck race where the sea levels are rising at nearly the same rate as the land itself is rising, due being released from the weight of the melted glacial ice [link].

Platform is mostly done, and today we start building the contoured foam landscape.

So far, we’ve been able to salvage and use almost all of the wood from our dumpster bounty to create the platform for the landscape. The structure needs to be strong enough to support one performer as well as the landscape model, so we added these extra trusses after a strength test that involved Murray bouncing around on the platform like a trampoline. Now it’s so strong it doesn’t even shift under the addition of new weight.

Today we meet with our two performers. We’ll shoot later this week.