Black is a funereal color, however, the umbrellas can also be viewed in a more generally sheltering or reassuring way. The set itself is a monochrome room into which you may enter easily, or be pushed, but from which there is no escape. The set opens up into the audience and thereby draws the spectators into this world as well. We see a group of dancers in colored clothes. Dark coats descend from above which the dancers put on like death coats.
Death gives the rhythm of a dance into which all join in.
The oversized coat is one such prop. It is stiff and rigid, much like Mozart's authoritarian father. Shoes are seen throughout the work, they represent not only themselves and their symbolism to Ms Scherzer of being a very personal item and one of the last things you give up before death but also as flowers being placed at a graveside or the piles of personal belongings as seen in the concentration camps. Ms. Scherzer and her associates have rearranged the music both for dramatic effect and practicality. At forty-five minutes, the Requiem is not long enough, as written, to accompany a full length ballet.