An Engaging Spectacle of Movement and Music

The members of the San Francisco Girls Chorus (from the City Box Office event page for last night’s performance)

Last night’s latest concert by the San Francisco Girls Chorus (SFGC) shared the stage of the YBCA Blue Shield of California Theater, part of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), with the Berkeley Ballet Theater. This synthesis of music and movement was co-directed by these two ensembles’ Artistic Directors, Valérie Sainte-Agathe, who also served as Conductor, and Robert Dekkers. Conceived to commemorate the Centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (granting women the right to vote), the program was given the title Rightfully Ours, consisting of eight new pieces of choreography set to choral works by eight living composers. The final two selections required instrumental accompaniment, provided by the Amaranth Quartet (violinists Abigail Shiman and Kashi Elliott, violist Christina Simpson, and cellist Bridget Pasker) and The Living Earth Show (TLES) duo of guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson.

The resources summoned for this production were not quite as massive as those that SFGC brings to its annual seasonal concert held every December in Davies Symphony Hall, but they were significantly more diverse. Nevertheless, one was quickly struck by how seamlessly Dekkers had integrated the choreography (provided by almost as many choreographers as there were composers) with movement patterns conceived for the SFGC vocalists. True, very few of the vocalists looked as if they had been trained in either ballet or modern dance; and, even when the movements were relatively simple, one could identify the dancers because their lips were not moving. Nevertheless, it was clear that Dekkers had conceived an all-encompassing fabric of movement that took in all performers except for those in the orchestra pit (conductor and instrumentalists).

Similarly, there was a sense that the entire program (performed without intermission) constituted an integrated whole, rather than a sequence of eight choreographed pieces of music conceived by a diversity of choreographers. One might question the extent to which that entirety had much to do with the Nineteenth Amendment, but that would distract from the impressively imaginative ways in which movement had been incorporated to become almost essential to the presentation of the music. Mind you, much of the “agenda” behind that music resided in the texts being presented; and this was probably the one weak link in the overall chain.

One had to consult the program book to appreciate just how wordy the overall program was. This posed a significant problem for the overall presentation. Lighting was such that one could not read the program book while the music was being performed. Indeed, given the extent to which dance had been incorporated into the presentation, even looking at projected titles would have distracted from the visual richness of the overall experience. In some cases words would still register by virtue of the command of diction shared by all SFGC singers. Nevertheless, some of the composers selected rather convoluted texts; and a few of those texts were written by the composers themselves. In other words at least some of these pieces seem to have been conceived to be read as the performance unfolded; and those pieces left the audience at a definite disadvantage.

This is why I chose to concentrate more on the “big picture” rather than the many devils plaguing the details. Take away the staging and one is left with a relatively uneven offering owing to the wide diversity of esthetic stances taken by all those composers. Ultimately, the most satisfying overall listening came from Steve Reich, who abandoned words entirely (“Clapping Music”), and Meredith Monk, whose “Panda Chant II” focused more on phonemics with little (if any) attention to semantics. The greatest disadvantage fell to Sahba Aminikia’s Music of Spheres, whose settings of three texts in Farsi were attentive to semantics but left without any means of conveying them.

As a result, the “burden of meaning” (so to speak) was carried for the most part by Dekkers. The good news is that he (as well as all those sailing under his flag) carried that burden particularly effectively. There may have been a bit more uniformity across the diversity of choreographers than might have been anticipated, but the extent to which the entire evening came across as a single well-designed fabric was far more significant. Having first encountered Dekkers through his work with TLES, I now find myself looking forward to his future projects.