This painting is inspired by The Green Table ballet. I watched it in June performed by Birmingham Royal Ballet; it is a 1932 anti-war ballet choreographed by Kurt Jooss, and it still haunts me and excites me.

This scene is satiric, sharp, and compelling in those extracted gestures and smooth movements — the ugliness in performative, even humorous elegance. With a cold and rich music score, politicians doing their slippery diplomatic dance in a safe meeting room that swiftly leads to war and death that happen to real people.