Sheep Shooting

Talk story about a video shoot of 12 sheep on the Brooklyn Bridge. The sheep, Karen Goldman explains, are to be photographed walking along the bridge footpath for a large-scale music-and-performance work, "The Return of the Native," which is a collaboration between Peter Gordon, the founder of the Love of Life Orchestra, & Kit Fitzgerald, a painter & live-video artist. "Peter has written an art-rock suite, which will be played on the BAM stage by a live band," Karen says. "And Kit will project a mixture of previously taped material--sheep & other rural scenes--& spontaneous images, which she 'paints,' on an enormous screen suspended over the heads of the musicians. "The sheep arrive in a Dawn Animal van. Bambi Brook & Dennis Kirsch, two animal trainers, get out. Six of them are called 4-H sheep, because they were given to Dawn Animal by 4-H girls who couldn't bear to think of having their pets slaughtered. "Some of the others were rescued from ritual sacrifices or sent to us from animal shelters," Bambi said. Tells about the shoot & about some children from P.S. 29 in Cobble Hill on its way back from a walk to Manhattan. Writer interviews Peter Gordon, who says, "Sheep represent rural gentleness & past traditions. But they are framed in computerized video --a very modern electronic context. The question is: Can we survive our future?"

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com