Behind them a backdrop painted in wintry grays and whites scrolls by.
The bandstand was done up as a white-columned mansion, the backdrop painted with cotton bushes and slave quarters.
A backdrop, painted to resemble three pastel-tinted buildings characteristic of a small Puerto Rican town, was framed by palms, ornamental bananas and flowers.
The models, all black, walked a runway in front of a backdrop painted banana yellow, with two black stripes: a reference to the danfo bus ubiquitous in Nigeria.
We are shown a sort of village — a corps of eight women and eight men, against a backdrop painted with a van Gogh-ish landscape — and, in front, what seems to be a betrothed couple, Frederi and Vivette.
"It's a conversation," said Mr. Buckingham, a habitué of Triangulo, a dance studio on West 20th Street, where on a recent summer evening, dancers swayed against his backdrop, painted with the likenesses of many other regulars.
A stage had been erected with a fine backdrop painted by a local man and, after the dance-troupe had done its stuff to enthusiastic applause from the folk drinking cider or eating burgers on the hay-bales, a melodrama featuring six-guns, bar-room disputes and a blonde, enacted to the narrative of a doleful western ballad, held the stage.
"Astonishment," which will be performed on Oct. 6 at the JCC MetroWest in West Orange, is not a play, but a staged reading with simple backdrops painted by Laura Schreiber, the book's illustrator and Ms. Slepian's frequent companion.
Lugné-Poë's production of Maeterlinck's play Pelléas and Mélisande typified his technique no furniture or props were used; the stage was lit from overhead, most of the time to a level of semidarkness;a gauze curtain created the illusion of mist; and backdrops painted in gray tones conveyed a general air of mystery.
