Hello Hello! on Fire!

a treatment

Hi. My name is Pete Lee (to find out a little more about me, feel free to click around this site, or you can go directly to my bio page right here). It’s an honor to walk you through this treatment. We’ve got lots of ground to cover, but please feel free to peruse at your own pace, and please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or comments. Let’s go!

intro

The path to making ourselves whole again can be a bizarre maze: it’s hard to tell how far you’ve come, how far you have to go, and often times it feels almost inevitable that we’ll end up piercing people we love along the way.

In this treatment, we imagine “Hello Hello on Fire” as a narrative dance piece - a small rollercoaster that goes from absurd to bloody to serene - following a young woman who goes through great lengths each day to resist the urge to murder people she likes, all the while hiding the long line of bodies who seem to follow her everywhere.

Change isn’t pretty. It’s often messy. People get hurt. sometimes badly.

This piece - conceived from the conversations Josiah and I have had over the years - honors those who know that they’d get hurt, but choose to let us in anyway. This piece is for them.

But if you’re in the middle of your journey and need a momentary break to observe and even laugh at the absurdity of life, this piece is for you too.

story

(in this portion of the treatment, we are going play a little fast and loose with the accompanying visuals - please don’t think of these as storyboards or reference frames, but rather, treat these as a color guide - it’s something I’m trying.)

Intro + Verse One

Julia fixes herself in the bathroom mirror, proud of her little thrift store find. This is going to be a good date. As Josiah’s voice drops in, Julia sneaks US - the impartial viewers - a quick, nervous glance, silently asking us to wish her luck.
But, as she strolls towards her seat, something seems off. It’s not just Julia’s constantly seeking reassurance from us, total strangers…

Behind her…hold on…is she being followed by a trail of corpses?

No matter, Julia does her darnedest to distract us - all but muscling us to her table, revealing JOSIAH as her date -

(←and yes - the camera is Julia’s primary dance partner here. She’s gonna do everything it takes to convince us that she’s fine, she’s having a good time, and there’s absolutely no procession of corpses following her around.)

verse 2

The second verse unfolds like **small talk on a first date**, Julia goes along; laughing when she’s supposed to, and nodding when she’s supposed to, but just as things are going well for her, **something else catches her attention…**

…But the **steak knife**…it just lays there, looking so sharp and so shiny, begging Julia to pick it up.

As Julia fights the urge to pick up that knife, we engage in a slapstick piece of choreography, partly inspired by *Pina,* part *Evil Dead II -* where Julia has to **WRESTLE HER OWN HAND**, all the while being the perfect date, smiling and nodding along to Josiah.
Finally she relents. She picks up the knife, when -

music cuts out

Nothing happens.
They’re just one of the many couples having a good time on a Saturday night. *It’s all in your head, Julia.*
**EXCEPT…**

breakdown

Behind her, the diners have been quietly replaced by the corpses. As the music rises, so do they. Mirroring and amplifying Julia’s every gesture in sync. Like a Rosas dance piece, Julia’s movements reverberate through the bloodied diners.

Each corpse takes turns re-enacting Julia’s deeds - lifting, swinging, passing her around, each one of them enters into a macabre tango of stabbing and strangulation before passing her to the next victim. *This woman is a killer. A total monster.* Julia tries to play it down, she tries to reassure us that this is all a silly misunderstanding, but as the musical break grows - so does her murderous rage.

As the break climaxes, Julia gives in fully. *This is who I am: a monster.* The bodies overtake her, the choreography becomes wild and raw. Through the dance, Julia indulges in her bloody shame: *this is who I am. This is who I will ever be.*

last verse

When Julia comes back to, she notices the whole restaurant of diners are staring back to her, but before she can come up with an excuse, the diners sing to her in unison:
***Hello child eyes, hello Safe and home***
***Carrying the fire, still carrying the stone***
***You can put it down, betray the past***
***You’re in control, you get to say what’s next***
It’s ok, Julia. Stay. Don’t go.

coda

Josiah calmly sings out the final chorus.
Julia lays on the floor.
As the song ends, Josiah kneels over her, handing Julia that shiny and sharp steak knife. “*Do what you will, I’m game.*”
And, standing behind him, way way way out of focus, **the bodies appear to be on fire.**

choreographer / dance mood board

In each of our three set pieces, we seek to find movements that’ll reflect the raw emotions and the absurdity of feeling stuck in a cycle of shame. Just like Josiah’s music, we are here to create something raw, compassionate, but with a surprising dose of dark wit.

I’ve been wanting to collaborate with Choreographer Natasha Adorlee Johnson for quite some days now, and am thrilled to have her leading the charge on choreography. She’s a marvel at finding character in the movement, and she’ll be invaluable in guiding our actors (a mixture of professional and nonprofessional dancers here in the Bay) through the grueling shoot.

Director Thierry De May uses every trick in the book to capture the frenetic repetition in the original choreography. We shall steal from some of these tricks to tell our story about feeling stuck repeating our own past, and the desire to break out of it.

Love the choreography in this piece - how unexpected and honest it feels, and how the different characters can perform identical movements while staying fiercely independent of one another.

I’ve made a whole career out of mixing high-and-lowbrow art. We are going to do the same here in our dance piece.

location

We will be shooting at the beloved Moongate Lounge in the middle of San Francisco’s Chinatown. The restaurant is excited to collaborate and will do everything they can to support our scrappy and ambitious project.

colors and textures

Even though we’ll be shooting entirely indoors, we are going to draw from a much wider palette. These are some of the colors, textures, and lighting schemes that we aim to sneak into the piece. Though the pieces may take dark turns, we want the images to remain delicate and ethereal. This means accentuating the colors found in the space, playing with neon and fog, bringing the strobe in certain sections of the dance - and all the tricks in the book to turn the beautiful cozy lounge into worlds layered upon one another.