Six Degrees of Separation: images
The show needs a two-sided painting by Kandinsky, and both sides really have to appear. Janet produced this marvelous piece on Masonite. Getting it to rotate was tricky. Allen and Cal decided on a rotating Xmas tree stand before they actually had a line on where to procure one. (July isn't the best time to shop for such a thing.) Originally they wanted to mount it in the grid over the stage apron and let the picture hang from it, but the lender nixed modifying the device. My guess is it wouldn't have worked anyway.
So Andy built the frame and I brought a piece of round fir stock for a stem. It's proportioned like a giant sunflower, lots of stuff at the top of a rather pliable stalk. Allen and I planted a beam in the grid and attached swivel hooks to the beam and the top of the frame. It was pretty alarming to watch the whole thing sway back and forth, but connecting the swivels with a piece of black tieline helped it. When we turned it on it rotated, but Allen didn't like the sound the motor made. Andy had planned all along to enclose the mechanism in a box, and as soon as Allen said he wanted to use upholstery padding as a muffler I increased the size of the box. It's now as big as a fair-sized footstool.
A couple of days later, Andy told me that the swivels were not swiveling. The tieline had twisted and actually lifted the Xmas tree stand off the deck! Now he's making a daily trip to the top of the ladder to dab Vaseline in the hooks. After the first performance I nudged the stem to see if it was still swinging, but the Vaseline seems to have solved that problem.
The photo above shows one side of the Kandinsky just after we did the first part of the installation.
Just one more photo in this series, a view of the set a week before opening.
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Set photos