ALICE IN MARYLAND by Cole Frank ’11
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C O N C O R D A C A D E M Y M A G A Z I N E FA L L 2 0 11
s the sun sets, the students are faced with a dilemma. Despite having shot all day, they are behind schedule and still have a daytime scene to shoot. Equipped with film, lights, and colored gels, they must simulate daytime. As they set upon the task of positioning the necessary lights, the students cannot help but wonder how they ended up here, in a nineteenth-century manor, in southern Maryland, turning night into day. In the winter of 2009, Justin Bull and Richard Colton, respectively heads of the film and dance programs at CA, organized a project in which members of the Filmmaking 2 class worked with members of Dance Company at nearby Bearspot Farm to create music videos. That pairing of dance and film worked well; and when Bull began talking to Colton last spring about another collaboration, he
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“was hoping for a more involved, semesterlong collaboration this time.” After much deliberation, Colton was able to sell Bull on a preliminary idea that would explore the world of Alice in Wonderland through dance. As Colton put it, “The question and challenge was whether movement alone could, like Ariadne’s thread, lead us coherently through this word-filled world.” The next step was to find a location for filming. Around this time, Colton happened to be visiting Delabrooke, the Maryland home of Leander McCormick-Goodhart and Stephanie Starr McCormick-Goodhart ’80, parents of CA alumna Emma McCormickGoodhart ’08 and current CA student Anna McCormick-Goodhart ’12. Colton was struck by the beauty of the place. “It seemed the ideal place to film our project, and I asked
Stephanie and Leander if it might be possible,” he says. “They are incredibly generous people and said yes without hesitation.” Despite its distance from Concord, Colton and Bull were excited by the possibilities that the McCormick-Goodhart residence provided. As soon as the second semester started in January, Filmmaking 3 and Dance Company began to prepare for the trip to Maryland. Colton and the Dance Company worked tirelessly on developing and perfecting the Alice in Wonderland–themed routines they would be performing in Maryland. Meanwhile, Bull had decided to split his twelve-person class into two groups. One group, the dance team, would be working exclusively with the Dance Company in order to create a dance-based adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. The other team, the narrative team, would be working