PRODUCTION
The majority of the production of the designed performance is due to a wealth of collaboration with performers, a costume designer, and a dance choreographer. In this way, I felt that I was lucky to benefit from a broad expanse of talent that could follow my direction, but still contribute individual strengths into the work.

COLLABORATION

Performers:

I collaborated and directed a group of performers I found through school networks or through friends of the creative field. Due to a last minute back-out, I had to use a family member as a last minute substitution.

Rebekah Parga and Lars Francisco are currently part-time actors in the entertainment field, Abrahm is a film student at Art Center, and Adam Case is a part-time writer. However, the most important trait I found that the participants needed to have was a strong dynamic with each other. This was conducive to their communication once working under the constraint of 24 seconds and in performing in-sync. The two pairs of performers did seem to have this understanding, so the work they put into was particularly fruitful. My job was just to make sure they had the basic gestures of movement down in the way they moved through the intersection, and to constantly time them in rehearsals to make sure they'd make the time limit.

PERFORMERS PORTRAITS

Adam Case

Abram Fischer

] Lars Francisco

Bekah Parga

CHOREOGRAPHY

I had the advantage of meeting with a choreographer a couple times to consult on the general needs of a public performance. Heidi Duckler directs the Collage Dance Theatre in site-specific performances, and I went to talk to her about the deliverables in this kind of staged event. My largest takeaway from meeting her was to physicalize the story, and to do that was to listen to the verbs in the narrative and describe that through body movement.

For the most part, I had to design the choreography so it synced with the story. I designed dueling timelines where the pairs met in the center of the intersection. One pair performed their story of a desert, then the flow of irrigation, then the bursting of oranges at the center. The other pair marched into the middle as research scientists, simultaneously ripping off their lab coats to transform into their astronaut "Space Race" unitards at the center. My intent was to create a certain expression to their movements as a way to visualize these transformations that happened in history.

PHOTO DOCUMENTATION OF REHEARSAL

COSTUME DESIGNER

My costume designer, Mindy Le Brock, and I had the most involved collaboration. I had to generate timelines, condense narratives, and suggest imagery to explain the major concepts of the performance. I emphasized certain elements I felt would be visually rich and imperative for the spectator to observe, and I also made suggestions and alterations through various rounds of design sketches. Mindy had the task of translating my ideas and suggestions into fabricated garments of clothing that had a series of transformative looks which would highlight key moments of the narrative's timeline.

In fabricating the clothes, the majority of it was generated out of Mindy's studio in the Garment District of downtown Los Angeles. My intention of the costumes were to symbolically convey the major emblems of the historical stories. The transformation of the clothing was also to tie in Pasadena's constant reinvention from farmland to orbit city of Los Angeles. I was fortunate in Mindy's inventive design point of view so we could share similar vision in the outcome of the end product.