Arabella Rye, director

The director of These Very Stars, Arabella Rye, was a drunk and a visionary, whose films were characterized by massive kaleidescopic dance numbers. She had immigrated to Sel from Tux, where she was a gifted aerial choreographer and director of military marching band performances. However, she soon came to recognize the role of image-making in upholding the repressive Tuxedo regime, as well as her own complicity in this endeavor. She called it out loudly and publicly, drawing the attention–and ire–of those in power. Proclaiming that she would never again make another political work, Rye fled to Sel, where she was granted asylum. The Selenite crown went so far as to declare her its own national treasure. Though a bit presumptuous, this designation was quite convenient for Rye: the more her international renown grew, the more difficult it became for covert Tuxedo operatives to disappear her with any modicum of discretion.

Unsurprisingly, Arabella Rye detested her Vetiverian nationalist star Dimitri Phalaenopsis. These Very Stars was in fact their first–and last–collaboration. Rye had a seemingly bottomless well of creative epithets for Phalaenopsis, the most polite of them being "fucking twat." Phalaenopsis, in turn, merely shrugged, and attributed her abuse to the fact that she was as homely as he was beautiful.

Rye's directorial method was quite unusual, and merits some discussion here. She would lie in the center of the set in an open casket (so no one would step on her) staring up a mirrored ceiling that reflected the entire stage, which could accommodate hundreds of precision dancers, can-can-ing themselves into interlocking shapes. Through a bullhorn, she would bark orders at the dancers: "Nine fifty-six! Left leg is too low!" "Eighth line, tighten it up!" "Seventeenth line, you're sagging in the middle!" This was the most effective way, she claimed, to evaluate and adjust the dancers' symmetry and form. Though it would have been much easier for her to suspend herself from the ceiling the same way the cameras were suspended, or to set up a scaffold from which she could direct the action from above, Rye seemed to take perverse delight in lying in a casket and shouting up at God.