Making Ballet Sets

This week I've been spending my days volunteering with the Oregon Ballet Theater constructing these huge paper sculptures for the upcoming Body Beautiful Performance, which also coincides with the Body Beautiful exhibit that will be up at the Portland Art Museum.

Catch a clip of William Forsythe's choreography for the show here:


So the pieces we are building were designed by Seattle artist John Grade.  Please visit his site to see some fabulous work.

These are just sections of the medium sized pieces we are constructing, some of these are over 60 feet tall and don't even fit in the warehouse, so we construct them in parts to be assembled in the theater.

That's Brian, Ballet Employee, he answers all our questions and tells us what to do next and does a great job repeating himself over and over. He also puts the big panels together and suspends things from the ceiling. Basically the fun stuff.

Every piece of Tyvek is cut by laser precisely, we get batches of 30 or 45 sheets and then have to score them using another special made template, then we fold them up and  glue them on another specially made form. I'm doing Tier 1 here, which is one of the bottom sections that has holes in it. John Grade is all about precision.

Scoring an entire batch takes about an hour. Folding and glueing in stages takes something like 6-9 hours.

We use glue sticks to assembled each panel and once each individual panel is complete then we glue three of them together side by side. See that binder clamp in my hand, I have callouses from these darn things.

In exchange for a few shifts of (slave) labor I get a $10 voucher to redeem for my ticket to the ballet. I've never been to the ballet, so I'm excited that I'll get to go basically for free.

Special thanks to my station partner Grace, for taking these amazing photo's and making our shift fly by. 

Thanks a ton Grace, you are awesome!