It is hard not to take a personal approach to any performance by The Living Earth Show (TLES) duo of guitarist Travis Andrews and drummer Andrew Meyerson. My wife and I have been following their work since we first encountered them in April of 2012, when they prepared a program for the Tangents Contemporary Guitar Series. That may well also have been our first encounter with the music of Samuel Adams (then named on the program as “Samuel Carl Adams”).
Last night in the Taube Atrium Theater, the third program in the current San Francisco Performances (SFP) PIVOT Festival brought Adams back together with TLES. This time they partnered for the world premiere performance of Lyra, a full-evening composition performed over the course of 65 minutes with no intermission. However, the program was far more than a duo performance of a new score for TLES resources. The musicians were joined by the dancers of Robert Dekkers’ Post:ballet performing an extended dance interpretation of the Orpheus myth choreographed by Vanessa Thiessen. Furthermore, the choreography was created and executed in the outdoor settings of the arid landscapes of Eastern California, where it was captured on video by filmmaker Benjamin Tarquin. The projection of that video filled the entire wall of the Taube Theater behind the space for the TLES musicians and their instruments.
However, as the television hucksters keep saying, that’s not all. Those familiar with the Theater know that it has no natural acoustics. Any performance can only be heard and appreciated thanks to the Constellation® technology developed by Meyer Sound, which was built into the space. My first serious appreciation of this technology took place in January of 2019 when Earplay performed the world premiere of Flutter, Pulse, and Flight, composed by Charles Nichols. This was created for the amplified sounds of flute, clarinet, violin, and cello. Those sounds were subjected to real-time digital processing involving spectral analysis and resynthesis, the results of which were then “projected” into the Atrium space. The physical trajectories of that projection were realized by Nichols himself using the Meyer control panel as his own “instrument.” Last night Adams’ score was as much a product of his working behind that control panel as it was of the TLES performers, whose sounds were being captured.
Mia J. Chong, Colleen Loverde, and Anthony Pucci depicting the three-headed Cerberus in Benjamin Tarquin’s film for Lyra (courtesy of San Francisco Performances)
According to the program book, Adams’ composition was structured as twelve movements, each of which was distinguished by the dancers involved in performing the respective movements. There was also a “cast listing” with the familiar names of Orpheus (Babatunji Johnson), Eurydice (Moscelyne ParkeHarrison), Hades (Cora Cliburn), and Persephone (Landes Dixon). However, there were less familiar characters, such as the three goddesses of fate and destiny (two embodied by the musicians), Atropos (Emily Hansel), Clotho (Andrews), and Lachesis (Meyerson). (For those wondering why the musicians were given roles, Clotho and Lachesis provided the threads that Atropos then used to manage the fate of mortals. In this case those threads are spun from musical phrases!) There was also a personification of Cerberus, the three-headed dog guarding the entrance to the Underworld, realized through the intricate interleaving of three dancers (Mia J. Chong, Colleen Loverde, and Anthony Pucci). For the most part, however, the narrative unfolded through suggestion, rather than explicit depiction, with the suggestions reinforced by the rhetoric of Adams’ score and the body language of the dancers.
All this made for a more than generous supply of content all packaged into a little more than an hour’s duration. Indeed, any effort to align the viewing and listening experience with mythological details would probably result in cognitive overload. This world premiere encounter probably fared best for those content to take the surface structure for what it was and go along for the ride. Given how much of the experience resided in Tarquin’s film, I could imagine the creation of a video for subsequent viewing, perhaps as a hypertext document with “footnote links” to account for the many details worthy of further explanation. Mind you, it might be tricky to account for the conclusion during which Orpheus, now alone, departs from the video and makes a physical appearance in front of the TLES musicians. However, I suspect that, if Tarquin wishes to provide such a hypertext document, he will have the resources to do so.
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