A collaboration with Salvador Dali
SCENARIO:
Salvador Dali’s graveyard is a surrealist sculpture park created in a town square, which features "pyrotechnic trees", burnable sculptures, and many other concrete irrational pyrotechnical furnishings from the Dalian iconography. The centerpiece of the graveyard is a 40-square metre mirrored-box mausoleum.
A funeral cortege of six giant samba-playing ants and other characters approaches the graveyard accompanied by the piercing sound of firecrackers and enters t
hrough the 'premonitions of civil war' gate, a full three dimensional realisation of Dali's most famous painting.
"Criminally-elegant ladies" with bodies metamorphosing into chests of drawers exercise their dogs in the graveyard. A pyrotechnic storm erupts from a criminally-elegant lady's "crutchbrella".
A "criminally-elegant elongated nude" poses whilst Dali sketches her in fire. He then rapidly dashes off a four-metre pyrotechnic self-portrait.
The super "flare cauldrons" are activated and Dali showers in fire. This is followed by the dreamy passage through the graveyard of the "Sleep" characters on stilts and crutches - these are animated elongated heads modeled on the celebrated Dalian image of sleep. They are followed by 16-metre tall illuminated inflatable interpretations of the Dalian "Angelus" images, and a pair of enormous inflatable hands, as featured in the painting of Narcissus, which float through the graveyard to the sound of Bach metamorphosing into the foot-stamping rhythm of a pure flamenco.
An oriental scale introduces the "Temptations of Saint Anthony Parade" featuring a pair of four-metre elephants, the criminally-elegant blue nude, a green Saint Anthony carrying a pyrotechnic cross, and a host of whirling dervish one-legged "Dalis" carrying Catherine wheels.
An extract from Mahler heralds the entry of an 18-foot steel pyrotechnic realisation of the celebrated Dalian image of the burning giraffe. This contains 100 small colour-changing Catherine wheels topped with a spine of fire.
This is followed by the whirling dance of one legged "Dalis" carrying fire wheels amongst the tall-as-buildings "Angelus" inflatables, the "Sleeps", and the six-metre inflatable hands. This dance is set against a backdrop of very special effects including a four-metre high burning replica of the "premonitions of civil war" in piedra carton, several large multiple Catherine wheel installations (both horizontal and vertical), and roman candle installations.
The final intervention is the dance of Dali and Gala, two forty foot tall giant puppet tango specialists. These puppets are an invention of NWSI and have an animation of movement unequaled by helium inflatables and other types of giant puppetry.
The show ends with a celebratory bouquet of aerial pyrotechnics.