That recording is a sort of aural backdrop for any version of "Porgy and Bess" I encounter now, though I try to erase it as much as possible when seeing a new incarnation.
In popular imagination, New Zealand has become the home of dwarves, elves, dragons and 4ft-tall hairy-footed Hobbit burglars since director Sir Peter Jackson used his homeland as the backdrop for his version of Middle Earth in the Academy-Award winning film series.
His interviews, conducted against a neutral backdrop, expose different versions of events and their many contradictions.
Charles Jennings charts America's discovery of England as the theatrical backdrop to its own version, or parody, of the aristocratic life.
The N.B.A. is fixated on LeBron James's picturesque one, with the illuminating backdrop of last year's version with the Cavaliers.
McCain's speech in New Orleans on June 3 of this year — the night Obama effectively clinched the nomination — was delivered against a sickly green backdrop, a poorly executed version of an idea Schmidt borrowed from the eco-friendly 2006 Schwarzenegger campaign.
WHEN Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Robbins and Arthur Laurents created "West Side Story" in the mid-'50s, they lived within walking distance of the concrete alleys and playgrounds that were the backdrop for their updated version of "Romeo and Juliet," the crowded tenements where new Puerto Rican migrants rubbed up against the Irish, Poles and Italians who had preceded them.
Ms. Brown's own solo, "Good & Grown" (a New York premiere), employs pictorial images on its backdrop while Saycon Sengbloh's version of a song by Wes Montgomery plays.
Four small metal rectangles presenting further shades of gray turn out to be photographs taken by Liz Deschenes of an earlier version of the "Backdrop" piece (which is a great thing, not unlike a poor man's cork-lined room).
It may seem an unlikely setting, yet Hyde's can-do attitude was honed in the real-life version of this backdrop, in the late-1970s and 1980s when she set up her own, hugely successful outplacement consultancy, the sale of which was to make her a millionaire.
