In Ballet Wichita’s latest production, dancers spin Lewis Carroll’s topsy-turvy Wonderland from the page to the stage. But part of the magic of the ballet comes from another kind of choreographed dance happening before audiences’ eyes.
CJ Marsh is an artist and adjunct professor with Wichita State University’s digital art facility, Shocker Studios. Marsh led the team of young illustrators who created the visual world of Wonderland.
“There's been a lot of very long evenings, days, afternoons of me watching phone recordings of dances and the dancers — having that in one window, having the files that I'm working on in this window, and with my earbuds in, just going back and forth between the same scenes, making sure it transitions correctly,” Marsh said.
Ballet Wichita director Katie Andrusak said Shocker Studios was an obvious partner when the company selected “Alice in Wonderland” as its summer production. The company works with students from Shocker Studios to design painted backdrops and props for its spring production every year.
As the company was wrapping up this year’s spring production, Andrusak approached Marsh with her vision for an "Alice in Wonderland" ballet.
“A lot of our students, including myself, we’re all big fans of old animations and stuff like that and artwork, and immediately we all wanted to jump on,” Marsh said. “We all had ideas already springing to life.”
But Andrusak's plans for this ballet asked a little more of Shocker Studios than what students had contributed in the past. For more than a year, Andrusak had been thinking of how to create a touring production of “Alice in Wonderland.” The Wonderland created for this production would need to be adaptable, moveable — the company’s first projection-style backdrop.
Marsh took Andrusak’s idea to his animation students at WSU in May. Three students — Anika Eicher, Oliver Thompson and Klete Keller — volunteered to take on the task of building digital, animated projections for the ballet.
The students leaned into their individual styles to tackle different moments in Alice’s adventures.
“I wanted to do the Wonderland portion,” Eicher said. “I was really excited about doing the Cheshire Cat, because I like doing more whimsical stuff. So I was super stoked to work on that.”
Thompson led the design of the ‘real world’ and Alice’s tumble down the rabbit hole. Eicher created a bright and colorful Wonderland that enchants Alice. And Keller crafted the Queen of Hearts' imposing castle and expansive gardens for the ballet’s climatic finish.
Over several weeks, Marsh and the students worked to sketch out their ideas for Alice’s world. Once each artist settled on a sketch they liked, they uploaded the drawings to various illustrating software and digitally painted their sketch. The digital paintings were refined or added to in Adobe Photoshop. That piece was then transferred to Adobe After Effects, where parts of paintings were animated by hand to move and react in response to the characters on stage.
Marsh took each of the scenes and made sure they flowed into one another and matched with the precise movements Andrusak had choreographed for the dancers.
Marsh also made sure the projections would work no matter where Alice was being performed.
“Typically when we work on a production, we work with a LED screen and it has a certain set of dimensions,” Marsh said. “You make sure everything's set to those dimensions and then you play it, and then it goes.
“The problem that we run into with these different venues is each one is different, and each screen and size is different,” he said.
Marsh and the students had to create adaptable designs that would work as the ballet moved from the Ottawa Memorial Auditorium to Friends University to the Granada Theater in Emporia and the McPherson Opera House.
“Not to toot my own horn,” Marsh said. “I preemptively worked the way that I worked, so everything can be easily adjusted. Everything can just pop into place and then I just hit upload, and it takes like two minutes.”
That’s a feat Marsh is particularly proud of after working with Ballet Wichita on a past production where some student projections took 23 hours to upload after updating.
For the student illustrators, learning opportunities abound working on Wonderland. Keller said before this production, he hadn’t considered artistic direction or production design as realistic career options.
“Now that I have been a part of a team and have been a part of an established pipeline [and seen] just how we can streamline a creative process, I think, yes, I could see myself being a part of a production team again,” Keller said.
Thompson agreed. He said working with Ballet Wichita on this production helped him realize he can help create some of the things he loves about performance art.
“I love going to live concerts and a lot of times artists will have projections up behind them,” Thompson said. “Before doing this, it never clicked that someone does that work and that someone like could be me — it's pretty cool.”
