Flocks of Sheep, Seven Stories Tall, at the Crossroads of the World
In the city that never sleeps, most people could not be bothered to count the sheep that for three minutes every night this month have been filling more than 20 electronic billboards in Times Square.
Bales of hay, flocks of sheep and other pastoral scenes that were shot in Wyoming are being beamed onto screens ranging in size from 15,000 square feet down to 32 — small enough to fit on the side of a newsstand. A sheep’s face peered over Broadway between 42nd and 43rd Streets as it appeared more than seven stories tall on the Nasdaq billboard.
The glimpses of rural life displayed in the heart of New York are part of “Midnight Moment,” a synchronized digital art exhibition curated by Times Square Arts that lasts from 11:57 p.m. to midnight each night. The footage, from a yet-to-be-released documentary called “Counting Sheep,” was first shown on Dec. 1 and will appear through Dec. 30.
The footage began its journey to Times Square in 2013 in Kaycee, Wyo., about 70 miles north of Casper, with two octogenarian sheep ranchers and two filmmakers.
The filmmakers, Tal Yarden of Brooklyn and Jessica Medenbach of Kerhonkson, N.Y., visited Wyoming to get footage of the countryside for an opera production of “Brokeback Mountain” planned for the Teatro Real in Madrid.
On the last day of their trip, they visited Kaycee, a town of 300 people with ties to agriculture, mineral-related businesses and tourism, but with roots in the wild West. Twenty-five miles south is Hole-in-the-Wall, the remote rocky pass used in the late 19th century by cattle rustlers and other outlaws — including Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch — as a hide-out.
Mr. Yarden, a theater designer, and Ms. Medenbach, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, met with the ranchers, Don and Peto Meike.
The brothers’ ranch has been in their family for four generations. At its peak, it covered 40,000 acres and was home to about 5,000 ewes, Don Meike, 87, said in an interview. Most of the land has been sold or leased, but the ranch still has about 1,400 ewes.
The filmmakers were in a pickup truck along an unpaved road with Peto Meike, 82, and a sheep dog named King when inspiration for the documentary struck, Ms. Medenbach said in an interview.
Mr. Meike provided an encyclopedic commentary on the history of the ranch, noting where dinosaur bones had been found and Native Americans had been chased off their land.
The next morning over breakfast at the Country Inn diner, Ms. Medenbach and Mr. Yarden talked with growing excitement about documenting the lives of the Meike brothers.
Ms. Medenbach described the project as being about “nostalgia for childhood and the pastoral American ideal that, I think, a lot of Americans yearn for that is both hidden and fading away.”
For the Meike brothers, who never married and do not have children, the filmmakers’ questions about the future loomed large.
“What happens when you get older and you built up this legacy and you have ideas about the legacy and how do you pass it down when you don’t have someone to pass it down to?” Ms. Medenbach said.
Don Meike said that he was unsure how long he and his brother would continue on the ranch, where the sheep are raised primarily for meat. “We thought we were retired, but we seem to work every day,” he said.
The filmmakers raised $25,000 through a Kickstarter campaign and returned to the ranch three more times. One visit was in December 2013, when Mr. Yarden said it was “unbelievably cold,” with winds of 50 miles per hour, forcing him to struggle with his lenses while wearing gloves.
The ranchers’ sheep dogs served as Mr. Yarden’s “assistant directors” by funneling the herd so that he could get better images, he said.
Ms. Medenbach said the ranchers “have a whole choreography with the sheep dogs where they can artfully maneuver herds of several hundred.” She added that when a sheep got stuck in a pond, the dogs would come from different directions to motivate them “to catapult themselves out of the bank of a pond when otherwise they may sit there in the mud for hours.”
The filmmakers have about 30 to 40 hours of footage so far and hoped to visit the ranch once more before editing “Counting Sheep” and showing it at an independent film festival.
Mr. Yarden, who last year did the video design for “Lazarus,” an Off Broadway musical built around songs by David Bowie, was contacted by Times Square Arts about displaying video for “Midnight Moment.”
Sherry Dobbin, director of Times Square Arts, said the installation “has been received with a bit of wonder.”
“The light, the sparse landscape and the ranch so quickly distinguishes itself from the man-made, highly-technologic environment,” she wrote in an email.
Last Wednesday, just before midnight, Jasmin Burgess of Perth, Australia, stood on the corner of 43rd Street and Broadway. It appeared she was waiting for the crosswalk signal to change, but she was there to watch the video after seeing it advertised on a trash bin.
“Rock This Town” by the Stray Cats blared from speakers outside the Hard Rock Cafe, making for an incongruous soundtrack to the bucolic images above. Ms. Burgess watched, transfixed.
She said the footage was “really cool,” adding that she was drawn to see both the sheep and Times Square. “Anything that is a bit country pulls at the heartstrings,” she said.
P.C: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/us/times-square-midnight-moment.html
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