event musings: chance photo shoot (here lies love)

Photo Shoot: Chance and Here Lies Love
Friday May 17, 2013
The Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street

First view of first copy of inaugural issue of CHANCE, fresh from the printers, opened 14 May 2013. — First view of inaugural issue of CHANCE, fresh from the printers, opened 14 May 2013.

Chance Magazine, discussed by our core staff in excited shouts and earnest whispers over the past year, inspiring articles on shoots in a Yonkers Mansion and the burlesque venue The Box, is now a real thing. Boxes of the first print run arrived in the Chance Magazine offices at Union Square last week and the inaugural issue now is in the mail to our community of initial subscribers (and feel free to join us). Our staff language now morphs completely from wishful to workmanlike, from pure vision to vision + practice, from yearning to strategic. Welcome to Chance, indeed.

Articles and photo shoots assembled over the past year to populate much of issues two and three are well underway. And yet there is much more work to be done. On a beautiful May Friday, just three days after viewing the long-awaited print copy of our first issue, three Chance staff members and a production costumer meet on the stage of Here Lies Love at the Public Theater for an all-day photo shoot to capture several lovely costumes featured in this political dance rave by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, inspired by the lives of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos and the people of the Philippines. At the helm of the photographic vision this day is Plamen Petkov, with Fitz Patton offering assistance and problem-solving all day long. Lovely Andrea Hood, assistant costume designer for the show, assists, dresses the mannequins, is generally good company for hours on end. And I query and observe and drink in the work light illuminated non-performance animated bare stage world. Plamen’s deep focused clear visioned luminous photographs will appear soon in an upcoming Chance issue. For now, allow me to share a few images of our day in a box, with pink-painted details and movable platforms, costumes with backstories, and the promise of theatrical magic.