Dancers in painted costumes of teal, magenta and orange link hands across the stage in front of a giant screen of projected painted rain — Petrichor, Miami City Ballet.

Petrichor

Performance · Miami City Ballet

Petrichor is the smell of earth after rain. It’s also a ballet by Pontus Lidberg for Miami City Ballet, set to Philip Glass's Violin Concerto No. 3. The projection behind it is mine: a painting twenty-five feet high and ninety feet wide, moving for all thirty minutes of the piece.

It behaves like water on a window — rain finding its way down the glass, one color bleeding into the next. It begins in black and white and finds color as the concerto goes on, with the dancers bright against it. The whole problem is pace. It has to move enough to feel, and not enough to watch.

An orchestra plays the concerto at a slightly different tempo every night, so the animation can’t just run. It’s cued to the music and programmed to arrive at certain moments however the evening goes. That got worked out on site: walking the stage for scale, sitting through rehearsals, testing what reads from the back row, listening to the orchestra, and going back and forth with Pontus, the stage manager, the lighting designer and the programmer until it held. Then the premiere with a live orchestra, and a bow on stage, which animation doesn’t usually offer.

Ballet · 30 min · 2023

Audio: Recorded music, not the premiere's orchestra.