Jan. 25, 2012 - Issue #849: Blind Date
The Highest Step in the World
He fell for four mintues and 36 seconds, reaching speeds that neared 1000 km per hour before pulling an experimental parachute—the mission's actual objective was to test this equipment—and floating back down to Earth. It was a very literal leap of faith that caught the attention of Ghost River Theatre's co-artistic director David Van Belle when he came across Kittinger's story on late-night television.
"I saw this documentary and I thought, 'Why haven't I heard this story before?'" he explains in a Skype call alongside Ghost River's other artistic director, Eric Rose. "'It's so fantastic and almost unbelievable that this guy rode in a balloon up to the edge of space—some people make the argument that he was the first man in space before Yuri Gagarin, he went up a year before Yuri Gagarin did—and then he skydived from this balloon."
He brought the idea to Rose—"I'm a big NASA nerd; so is Eric. We all love this space stuff," Van Belle admits—and they began to develop what's now become The Highest Step in the World, a one-man, multi-media examination of Kittinger's story, and in a deeper way, the very concept of risk, of what would give a man the sheer cajones to leap into deep sky from then unimagined heights. It's a story that lends itself quite well to dramatic form, Rose notes.
"All the astronauts talk, quite spiritually, actually, about how going up above the Earth, and being able to see the Earth—and the guys that landed on the moon, being able to block the Earth out with their thumb—changed the way that they saw life," he says. "And there's something about that idea, of going up as one person, and then coming down as another. Almost instantly, you have a dramaturgical structure."
Van Belle performs The Highest Step alone, on a blank-white stage, though it quickly illuminates with projections, including some projected onto Van Belle himself. He takes to the sky, too, in a harness; Rose and Van Belle together note that in the show's initial developmental stages, they had multiple workshops of simply playing around with technology, toying with the idea of taking the concept of "down" away from the audience.
"I think for us, as a company, for Ghost River, one of the things that we feel is unique about the way that we approach our work is that form is equal in weight to content," Eric says. "And that means the story is one aspect of what we do. But the way that we tell that story is of equal importance, and so often when we discuss new projects we talk about the story in relationship to how we want to tell it."
Fri, Jan 27 & Sat, Jan 28 (7:30 pm)
Directed by Eric Rose
Arden Theatre, $25 vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus
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