The Baltimore Waltz by Paula Vogel

The concept of Baltimore Waltz - a show about a young man and his sister going through a fantasy trip through Europe, as the sister, Anna, copes with the news that her brother has been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS - was to capture the beauty and the pain of the AIDS epidemic. We heavily relied on impressionist music, especially an orchestral arrangement of Claude Debussy’s Reflets Dans L'eau. This use of theme allowed us to move in and out of the disco world that Krell and Van Velsor were working to create. We used appropriate 80’s and 90’s themed music, and combined “glitch” sound effects such as static to move us in and out of our fantasy world, and across countries.

The show is framed by three waltz’s which take place throughout the show. In the second waltz, which is in the second-to-last scene of the show, Anna’s world is crumbling around her, as she watches her brother both in her fantasy and in real life die. We subvert Paula Vogel’s requested Emperor’s Waltz with increasingly disruptive distortion and stutter effects, and then, in the end, layer in a heart monitor, which is slightly out of pitch, pulling us out of Anna’s fantasy and back into the stark reality of the Baltimore hospital. Finally, he dies. See below for an excerpt.

In one particularly interesting scene, we jumped from location to location in France using La Vie En Rose in triplicate. We started with the Edith Piaf version in a cafe, transitioned to the Louis Armstrong version, and then ended with Donna Summers for a sex scene.