All that you ever were pools in slow motion tableaux, while you hover weightless, invisible, yearning.
The show opens with a slow-motion tableau, the six cast members entering as if walking through water, some holding what could be M-1 rifles above their heads.
Otherwise Ms. Childs and Sheryl Sutton and a few others told elliptical stories and acted out slow-motion tableaus (Patty Hearst holding her rifle, the young Einstein and his wife on a train's caboose platform).
Everything was in slow motion, the stadium tableau like something out of an HM Bateman cartoon entitled: "The Man Who Pissed In The Vegemite".
Illustrated adverts for cosmetics or domestic products were often constructed as tableaus, offering scenes frozen in motion centred upon young women, wives, or mothers in the act of dressing, washing, shopping, or conversing.
A virtuoso sequence in which Ferdinand is repeatedly pitched into the air in slow motion is pure anime; the "men of sin" tableau with Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian could have been inspired by the Hellraiser films.
Russian creativity revolved around inertia, he explains, with plays, novels and operas that were essentially a sequence of self-enclosed tableaux, while Western harmony was a study in motion, propelling the music and, on a larger scale, giving it shape.
McDermott, in collaboration with the set designer Tom Pye and the costume designer Kevin Pollard, achieved another wonder here: many tableaux played like cinematic reënactments of Egyptian friezes in motion, with surreal anachronisms intermingled.
But the program he presented on Thursday night at the Danspace Project at St . Marks Church resembled nothing so much as dear old tableaux vivant, that staple of 19th-century home theater, with motion added to increase the liveliness of his living or staged pictures.
In "Grande Jatte" (not in this show), for instance, the largest figures in the painting, a man and woman dressed in their Sunday best, stand rigidly like figures leading a procession near the right edge of the canvas, surveying a dreamlike tableau of adults, children and their pets in what appears to be arrested motion.
The museum becomes a gigantic tableaux vivant, a microcosm of the city as a whole, a world in perpetual motion.
