PL09 — Lakeside Tango Pavilion
Version 2.0.0

An imagined timber dance pavilion on a northern lake in high summer: earnest melancholy set to a tango beat, couples circling with dramatic seriousness, mosquitoes, long light, and a comedy of profound feeling in sensible shoes.

SEMANTIC SEED

Create work that is delighted, quick-witted, alluring, and distinctly itself. Use this semantic seed as an aesthetic starting point. Interpret it through your medium, letting its character guide the discoveries you make as the work develops. Keep the place adult and dramatic: wit is its register, and charge is its constant.

Imagine a timber dance pavilion on a northern lakeshore in high summer, open at the sides, with a worn sprung floor and a stage hung with paper lanterns. Let the evening light be long and gold, the lake flat and pewter, mosquitoes dancing in the low sun, and a tango played with total dramatic seriousness by an orchestra of local professionals. Give the work the comedy of profound feeling: couples circling with grave expressions, women on one side of the room and men on the other, a lone figure sitting out the first set, a cigarette smoked in the wings, the occasional collapse into laughter. Let wood, paint and rope show the wear of many summers. Adult charge lies in the invitation, in the walk across the floor, and in a dance that treats longing as a regional industry.

SEMANTIC TAGS

open timber pavilion; paper lanterns; long gold light; solemn tango; worn sprung floor; longing as local industry

ARRIVAL AND CHARGE

A woman in a red dress and heels that could cross a continent, stepping onto the pavilion floor and holding out her hand as if she had come to select, makes the whole room look up from its melancholy. In a hall that exists for such invitations, her self-possession is not surprising but it is thrilling.
