ACT ONE: “The Birthday Party”
The first act opens with the birthday party of a teenage Girl on the brink of adulthood. She sits in her bedroom, gazing into her dressing table mirror that reflects back to her a galaxy of stars. As she muses, the members of her family are arriving to celebrate her coming of age. Once she joins them, they present her with gifts, each one an amulet which they believe will protect her as she passes through life. With their gifts they try to win her over to their particular set of ideologies and prejudices.
The party is gate crashed by Death disguised as an old tramp. She reveals to the Girl that, in the face of reality, all these gifts are powerless and encourages her to break free from her family’s influence and find her own truth. The Girl is too scared of their rejection to do as the old woman says but she is also disillusioned with the restrictions of her family’s narrow mindedness.
To escape her confusion, she shuts herself in her bedroom, where she creates a Dream Lover in her dressing table mirror. Her daydream comes to life and enters the room to dance a dance of passion and infatuation with her. As they consummate their love the girl becomes aware that her family is watching and they’re not pleased. Her Dream Lover calls for her to follow him and fulfil her dreams but, although she wants to go with him, she cannot do so without her family’s blessing. The inner turmoil that this creates within her divides her into two warring personalities, and it is in this divided state that she finally leaves home.
ACT TWO: “The Underworld”
The second act takes place in an urban wasteland, a desolate place on the fringe of civilisation. Death is here, now mistress of a heaving mass of society’s rejects who move as a collective Garbage Dump. The Girl enters, her character now portrayed by two dancers, one in black signifying her dark, cynical side, the other in white expressing her naïve, emotional self.
An electoral campaign parades through the Underworld complete with bodyguards and news reporters. The two smiling Presidential Candidates meet and greet while their female Assistants flash cash and cleavage at the grasping, pleading Dump. It gets so excited that a stampede ensues and one assistant is swallowed up, only to be disgorged as a pale faced bride who dances a deathly wedding waltz with a faceless Husband.
After the politicians have left, the two Girls dance with a succession of men: a maudlin Drunk, who wins the pity of the Girl in White, but the disgust of the Girl in Black; a primitive Satyr oozing unbridled sexuality who mesmerizes both girls with his brute power; and a possessive business Tycoon who lures the Girl in Black with riches only to then bully her white sister into a dance of submission. This incenses the other men into an angry confrontation which the Girl in White deflects by offering herself to all of them. She leads them off to a brothel while the Girl in Black dances a dance of impotent despair.
The Assistant-turned-Bride returns as a Career Woman, along with secretaries, office equipment and hospital machinery. She is now pregnant. Computer cables interweave with heart monitor wires as her frenzy of efficient activity is momentarily interrupted by her contractions and finally the birth of her child on the hoof.
Their exit is followed by the entrance of a heavily armed squad of anti-terrorist soldiers. Helicopters are heard overhead. The Girl in Black emerges from the brothel dragging her White double by the hair behind her. They tussle with each other hysterically in a tangle of guilt, despair and self-hatred. Eventually the Girl in White sinks to her knees like a sacrifice lamb as the Girl in Black looms over her, holding a knife poised over her head.
A glowing sphere descends from the sky suspended by a red cord. The shadowy form of a baby can be seen vaguely through its pearly surface. Pandemonium lets loose as the Dump crowds beneath the iridescent globe, pawing the air. The soldiers point their guns at it while scientists in haz-mat suits take readings on sensors and prepare to take it into quarantine. At the climax of all this turmoil, the Girl in White suddenly snaps out of her trance, grabs the knife with her Black counterpart and together they climb the Dump. They cut the cord that suspends the sphere, and both baby and girls sink down into the heaving mass of the Dump which consumes them. Darkness falls.
ACT THREE: “The Awakening”
Gradually, in the blackness, stars begin to appear and the sphere, now the only thing on stage, is slowly illuminated from within to reveal not the baby, but the Girl herself, curled up in foetal position, now whole and complete. The bubble gradually brightens and the girl awakens to begin a dance of self-discovery, an exploration of the grace and balance of her body’s movements. As her gestures become ever more suffused with vitality, the bubble unfolds like the petals of a flower and she now breaks free to dance an expression of the perfect harmony of her reconciled psyche
After a while she is joined by her Dream Lover but now, instead of losing themselves in infatuation, the lovers complement each other like the two wings of a powerful bird that sores up to embrace life in all its wonder. As their dance proceeds in a fluid ebb and flow, they are joined by more and more dancers, until the whole corps is engaged in a sinuous dance evoking the synchronistic movements of huge shoals of fish or the murmuration of a flock of birds, cued by an invisible silent force that flows through them, uniting them in one pulsating whole. The dance builds to an ecstatic climax and then gradually calms to soft ripplings as the lights begin to dim to reveal once more the night sky, but now aflame with the breath-taking colours of a super nova.