Chapter 51 – What’s in a Name?
The next morning Roger and the woman sat in her office writing the text of the ad they hoped would bring them a flood, or at least a trickle, of world-class dancing talent. From the theater space they heard The Whosey warming up the synthe with a version of one of his greatest songs, Brilliant Blues. Roger was tempted to go on stage and listen, but he knew it was important to implement the strategy the team had formed the previous day. He and the woman had to get the ad text done, and take it to a designer to add the graphics for websites and print media. It was a choreography day, and soon Townshend would play his transcriptions for Selgey and Bart.
Today would be a watershed day for Selgey and Bart; they were starting the choreography for Act IV, based on the Picasso painting. The dance movements for Acts I through III were complete, or at least well-developed, and stored on video in the computer. They were developed, that is, as well as could be, considering that Selgey and Bart didn’t have a corps of thirty dancers hanging around The Hall to experiment with. They had done the movements for the six principle dancers themselves, supplemented by Peter and Pater. This choreography was complete, and they were happy with it. The corps movements were complete in principle, but would have to be fleshed out when the dancers showed up for rehearsals, and that was going to be a challenge. The four dancers finished their coffee, sitting in the upholstered chairs on stage, listening to the beauty of Brilliant Blues. When Townshend finished the song they went over to the synthe, surrounded him, and started a conversation about Picasso’s cubist painting of a factory in Spain. Why did Stravinsky like the painting? What was the story that Stravinsky saw inherent in it? How could they manifest that story in music and dance? The five of them were in their element and working at peak creativity.
Roger and the woman weren’t exactly at their peak of creativity. Both of them were doodling on yellow legal pads. Roger’s mind was on the lyrics of the song he’d just heard: “I spend my mornings at the sunshine café.” He wished he was at a café, sitting with Gwen, talking about what burgundy they would drink with lunch. The woman interrupted these profound thoughts by saying something startling: “We don’t have a title for the ballet, you know. How can we write text for an ad when we don’t know what it’s called?”
“Huh?”
“The title, Roger. The title of the ballet. They have them you know. Swan Lake. Don Quixote. Giselle. What’s ours called? Igor didn’t do one. There’s nothing on the cover of the score except his signature and date. No title. We need one, don’t we?”
Roger looked perplexed, then said, “The Lost Ballet. That’s the title. The Lost Ballet.”
“No. That’s not a title. That’s just what we’ve been calling it. We know the score was lost to the world for ninety-eight years. 1914 till today. We found it. Now it’s not lost; it’s found. Now it’s The Found Ballet. Or, The Lost and Found Ballet, which sounds stupid. So, what’s its title? We need one for the ad. We need one for the poster that will be in the glass case outside the door of The Hall. That’s how they do things.”
Roger looked more perplexed. The Sunshine Café was calling. Go home afterwards, make love to Gwen. Then lunch. Then a nap. Then make love to Gwen again. That was the life of a gentleman aristocrat. That’s what he should be doing, not writing ads for ballets that didn’t even have a title. Who would write a ballet, and not title it, anyway. Stupid. Now he had to figure this out. The thing always was in his mind as The Lost Ballet, which had a poetic ring to it. He looked at the woman, who was waiting for him to figure it out. That was his job. She was the bean counter, the admin person. She didn’t do ballet titles. She stared at Roger without a feeling of confidence, given the look of perplexity on his face. She could tell his mind was at The Sunshine Café, not here in the office with her.
Roger pretended to attend to the problem by doodling on his pad, but gave up the pretense, him and the woman being good friends, and went out to find Gwen. When the going got tough, the weak minded went to her. She sat at the set of tables that Gale and Helstof worked at, looking at photos of costumes that supposedly represented naked people. You know, the ones made out of tight, flesh colored fabric, with minimal seams. There were a dozen photos of people in these things, men and women, and they all looked ridiculous. Gwen never had understood how professional designers and costumers could foist this crap on audiences. It was almost as bad as lip-syncing a song. Roger and Gwen once were watching a concert video on TV, and a famous rocker was lip-syncing a song Gwen loved, and she had gone to the cabinet and taken out her gun, and Roger was sure she was not kidding about shooting the TV, and he had to take physical action to stop her. There are only a few things in life that make Gwen hotheaded, and lip-syncing is one of them. Flesh colored costumes are not as bad, but they’re up there in her ‘I hate that’ category.
Roger walked up to the tables and said (lying), “We have the new ads almost done, but we need one thing. We need a title for the ballet.”
Gale, the mouth, said, “What do you mean? It’s The Lost Ballet. What’s wrong with that?”
Helstof looked surprised when Roger shook his head. Gwen said, “He’s right. That’s what we’ve been calling it, but that’s not its title. Stravinsky didn’t give it a title. There isn’t one on the cover of the score. The Lost Ballet is how we think of it, because we found it. But it wasn’t lost for him. We called it something for Catherine when the Le Monde people called her about it. What was it?”
The woman came out of the office and sat down at the tables, looking to see if Gwen had solved the problem. She said, “Look, we can’t just make up a title, it’s not right. Only the author can do that, and Igor didn’t do it. And we’re not musicologists, who categorize and critique and write about music. Let’s leave the problem to them to figure out, later. What we need is a PR thing. Something for the ads, the marketing. Something that’s going to tell people what the ballet is about, who wrote it, who’s playing and dancing it, and why they should buy tickets to it.” She looked around the table, where no one said anything, so she went on. “Maybe we do have it. Why not just call it Stravinsky’s Lost Ballet. That’s like the guy who called his show P.T. Barnum’s The Greatest Show on Earth. It worked for him, bigtime. And that’s what Gwen told Catherine to tell Le Monde a couple months ago, right? Stravinsky is a cool word, strange and poetic, and the lost ballet is intriguing. Cultural people will understand what’s going on here.”
The other three looked at each other and shrugged, yes. Sounds good. The woman had come through.
The Lost Ballet Page 51
