Preparing the passage…
The child beneath the flowers is Erichthonius. His moving tail carries us from the painted scene toward the world of clay.
The opening follows a separately imagined serpent child from painted color into dimensional clay and flat pottery art, then draws back to Athena. These generated movements are poetic interpretations, not recovered ancient images or Rubens surfaces.
Athena, the landscape and the vessel are imagined images made for this theatre. The camera movements add invented depth to these drawings. They are not photographs of ancient objects or a reconstruction of a known Acropolis route.
Apollodorus 3.14.6 tells of Erichthonius’s birth from the earth, Athena’s secret care, and the entrusted vessel. Pausanias 1.27.2–3 names Pandrosos’s sanctuary immediately before describing the girls and their unknown burdens.
The ancient account does not identify a child inside those burdens, or explicitly describe a reenactment of the basket story. Reading the earth’s enclosure beside the earth-born child is this theatre’s poetic construction. The ceramic vessel is an invented form for that reading.
Both carriers follow the original theatre’s complete imagined trail. Their steps are separately animated over a camera take of the empty terrain. At the ledge they rest. The drawing and the same two figures curve together over an imagined vessel through a continuous surface projection. The unseen exchange stays behind the drawing’s rock.
Read the passage on form and the returning girls in The Chronotope of the Virtual. Media and staging notes preserve the distinctions between source, illustration, generated movement and our choreography.
One of the theatre’s original imagined carrier illustrations.
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