In the corner of the living room there are two doors. When closed they form a right-angle. Halfway open they line up, making a wall that sections off a triangle.
Each door has fifteen panels of watery glass, arranged in a grid. Each is the width of a stretched hand. When someone walks from the kitchen to the hallway, only a dark shape can be seen.
Being down on the floor helps. I need the doors open to make time seem as wide. Even then, I made a system of the house. I liked to explain how it worked.
In Top Hat, Fred Astaire reaches into an ash-can, sprinkles sand over the floor, and performs a soft-shoe tap. His soles are muted by the sand. Ginger Rogers, on the floor below, can now sleep. She looks up at the ceiling in satisfaction.
The two characters are in rooms either side of the floor/ ceiling. The surface is the medium of their communication. The central point, this flat surface like a sheet of paper.
My grandmother and I wait for the clock to show exactly eleven until we allow ourselves elevenses. Two Mr. Kiplings come in on a plate. The sponge inside the icing is pale and hard. The icing stands up and apart, white moves diagonal down the pink.
The paper cases are pleated circles so that when the cake is taken out, they flop open.
In film it matters where things are. Meaning comes from placement and angle. The principles of stage design are harmony, variety, balance, proportion, emphasis and rhythm. Axial balance means that distribution of weight either side of a central axis is equal. In radial balance, weight is organised three-dimensionally around a point.
In Top Hat, balance is at first played out axially, Astaire’s body framed by the rectangle of the screen. Then, as the film progresses and he becomes less aware of an audience, he moves into the space inside the screen and balance becomes radial.
In cinematic space the ‘stage’ is both the rectangle of the screen, and the spaces within it, which continually move. Both spaces exist at the same time. Both balances happen at once.
Like cakes, musicals have a round shape. Somewhere in the middle desire resides. I eat each part of the cake separately: the walls first, then the sponge, then the cream inside the dome of icing. The dome of icing is left perfectly half-spherical, intact. It seems it could only come to exist by negation. When I eat the dome it cracks in my mouth, a thinness whose shape is no longer important.
Astaire begins percussing with a plate and ends dancing with a statue in his arms. He is now so unaware of an audience that he doesn’t register the noise he’s making till Ginger knocks on the door. He follows his desire around the room.