Conceived with Winokur's own young children in mind (they appear as Boy and Girl), the project is, as usual, energized by the elegant simplicity of the individual objects (an apple, an egg, a feather, an ice cube, a glass of water) and backdrop colors so bold that the room fairly vibrates.
"They simply started out as a way to test my ability lighting different backdrop colors without having to go full-scale," Whalen tells The Creators Project.
But, of necessity, the evocation of what life was like had to appear in their reporting principally as backdrop, as "color".
In "Fall Still Life," Lori Handler's carefully rendered watercolor study of gourds and berries floating against a neutral white backdrop, complementary color contrasts are the true subject.
For a typical recording in his basement, he stands in front of a green felt backdrop — the color of Iran's protest movement — and a line of Persian poetry that reads "Green means resistance until spring".
These bits and pieces of objects, punctuated by a painted eyeball here, a peacock feather there, are laboriously integrated into a fluid backdrop of color applied by brush or aerosol.
Jennifer Tipton has outdone herself with the lighting, changing the backdrop's colors.
With a backdrop of throbbing color by Bakst, and with the company's two most glamorous stars, Ida Rubinstein (Zobeida) and Nijinsky (the Golden Slave, her orgy partner), oozing around, this was something rather close to soft-core pornography.
In "Twenty-seven," the last of the "Mozart Dances," the company, previously in black and gray, appears in white; the lighting (by James F. Ingalls) goes up; and a new Hodgkin backdrop adds some color, a stroke of red, to the black.
