Each Page is a Stage

November 4, 2024

The choreographic process of creating a picture book

BY JULIA ALLISSON COST

Note: This article was first published in Stance on Dance’s fall/winter 2024 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

It took me six years to create my first picture book, The Girl and the Boat, and the process was an act of choreography. The square of the page is not dissimilar from the square of the stage. A book is a length of time folded up and bound in a cover. My book has no words, so the viewer “reads” my book by studying the characters’ movements and emotions to make meaning of the story.

The idea for my book itself came out of a moment in a dance rehearsal circa 2013, in which I had asked a dancer to sit facing a large wooden toy boat and ask it where it was going. That moment in rehearsal was profound and I went on to paint it as a large oil painting. I pondered that painting for years, imagining it as the start of a story. Indeed, 10 years later, I would go on to recreate that image for the cover of my picture book.

Choreographing a book, like a dance, is largely about designing the experience of the viewer. What is unique about a book is that there are infinite possibilities for the point of view of your audience. The below is a sample of the choreographic decisions I pondered in depth during the years of creating the 30 paintings for the book.

The girl is traveling down a pathway on this page and the energy of the scene should feel alive with wonder and curiosity. To achieve this, what is the best shape and direction of the path across the page? What is the color scheme that creates the energy that I am after? How much speed is in her movement, and how do I convey this with the position of her limbs and the way her clothes are moving? How does lighting and time of day enhance the feeling of this scene? If I bring the audience very close to the scene, it can feel intimate and convey inner emotions of the character. If I take the audience far from the character, that can lead to a sense of staring out into the distance, the solitude of a figure in space, and perhaps a feeling of longing. If I set up the scene to look at the characters from overhead, this can be useful for showing their proximity to each other. If I have the audience look at a character from behind her back, the audience can feel unnoticed, and this vantage point can feel peaceful and protected. If I sit the audience on the floor with a character, it can feel cozy and familiar. If I place the audience at the bottom of a hill while a character is traveling towards the audience, it can create anticipation awaiting the approach. If I allow the audience to discover a new character from behind the shoulder of a familiar character, the audience and the familiar character are on the same team. This can be a loyal feeling. If I have taken the audience on an emotional story arc and then reveal a sweeping view over a landscape, this can create the soaring end-of-the-movie feeling when you are ready for the credits to roll. If I surprise the audience with an unexpected epilogue of scenic/ color/ costume change, this may evoke surprise or even laughter, and this can shift the meaning of the entire story. If I zoom in on an object, this can create a feeling of nostalgia. Timing is also important to consider. If I zoom in on a character’s face suddenly, the emotion on the face feels important. I can also lure the audience into a sense of comfort by giving them steady, regular intervals of pacing, so they do not expect it when I slow down radically. This can be handy for making an audience vulnerable to experiencing deeper emotions. Shifting the pacing from hour-by-hour activities to moment-by-moment movements can have a big emotional impact for the thing I am slowing down to reveal. To complicate it further, the composition of the double-page-spread paintings need to work around the centerfold of the book without disrupting the images. And finally, since a western audience is accustomed to reading text left to right, this audience will also likely read paintings in a book in that direction. I must be aware of all these factors and use them to enhance the story.

For the first several years of working on my book, I carefully considered these questions as I crafted each beat in the story, designing the arc of emotion in sketches, and breaking down the story into the precise moments like a stop motion movie. Eventually, it came time to transform these sketches into finished paintings. I painted the first 10 pages in watercolor, but I was not satisfied. The children I was drawing from my head were sweet but felt flat and simplistic compared to how I knew I could paint them if I could study real bodies with light and shadow pouring across them. I wanted to be able to observe children kneeling, skipping, walking, turning, running, from overhead, from the bottom of a hill, laughing, holding back tears, etc. I knew that painting observationally would be the best way to achieve the level of realism I wanted in this book. I decided to paint the illustrations in oil on canvas, my favorite medium, and the one in which I knew I had the most ability to create richly realistic scenes.

At this juncture, I leaned even more into every skill I had learned from my performing arts background. Casting director: I reached out to two friends whose daughters looked like the girls I was drawing from my head. They sent me headshots and I pinned those to mood boards I was developing for each page. Costume and fabric designer: I got the girls’ measurements, searched high and low to find the color of fabrics and style of dress patterns that I had been drawing, and then sewed costumes. I sewed the costumes for the final scene with my own fabrics featuring my paintings. Location scout: I scoured Maui for places to stage every scene. I climbed on the roof, laid at the bottom of hills, identified rooms and gardens that I could transform into sets, and determined where precisely I should perch myself in each spot to get the best point of view. Lighting Designer: I studied the sun and shadows in each location at different times of day and planned when to stage the scenes accordingly. Prop master: I sewed a patchwork quilt, crafted set pieces, built tiny props, and sourced many objects for every set to be able to paint it all in vivid detail. Choreographer and Artistic Director: from May 2021 until Jan 2022, I did a series of photoshoots in which my amazing child models showed up in costume to perform the story in all the locations. My years of sketching, planning, and creating every detail finally came together in real life. During these shoots, I described the emotional experience of each scene to my models, designing different physical and mental prompts for them until their performances felt natural and realistic. I took hundreds of photographs for every scene to capture the expressions and movements of the children. And then finally, I prepared for the massive task of painting it all. I was relieved to have so many wonderful reference photos captured of the children’s facial expressions, clothing, and bodies in movement so I could relax about how they were rapidly growing into teenagers, faster than I could paint this book. Painter: from 2021 to 2023, I painted the 30 finished oil paintings. Each piece took me weeks or months, depending on the size and complexity. I painted them in order of appearance so that I would be aware of continuity from scene to scene. As I finished them, I hung them on the wall beside my easel until the canvases filled a space larger than 6 ft. x 6 ft.: a mural’s worth of tiny detailed brushstrokes. Early in the process, I thought I would include text in the book, but as I painted, I realized you could read the book in infinitely more ways if you could explore a page for the duration of your curiosity, instead of the duration of a sentence. I am so happy that my book is wordless. Like watching a dance, the scenes envelop the reader with visual wonder, allowing for silence and space to explore. With each reading the viewer may see the paintings in a completely new way.

Now, The Girl and the Boat is out in the world, and I have the amazing pleasure of watching person after person opening the book, studying the figures in the paintings, reading their own tale, and sometimes gasping and stepping backwards with tears in their eyes as they watch the scenes unfold. I can’t believe I made a piece of choreography that lives within the covers of a book, ready to play out whenever someone opens it.

Huge thanks to my models, Tehya Artzi and Kaia Coon, and their families who were so supportive of this years-long project.

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You can find The Girl and the Boat at juliacost.com and in a growing list of stores.

Julia Allisson Cost is a Maui-born-and-raised painter, textile designer, and picture book author. Learn more at juliacost.com and @juliaallissoncost.