Michèle Walther and Mark Galvan at Arc Gallery

Yesterday afternoon the Arc Gallery in SoMa hosted a duo performance by violinist Michèle Walther and dancer Mark Galvan. The program was in two parts, each beginning with a composed work followed by three improvisations on themes of Walther’s own composition. All six of those themes were based on tracks from Walther’s Colibri album. The three tracks for the first part were “Big Island” (also called “Mother Nature”), “Sunday Morning,” and “Waves.” Those in the second part were “Dancing Snake,” “Colibri,” and “Dark Night of the Soul.” The first part began with the “La Folia” variations in the last of Arcangelo Corelli’s Opus 5 set of twelve sonatas. The second part began with Astor Piazzolla’s “Libertango.”

One might say that repetitive structures were the order of the day in Walther’s performances. The “Folia” is one of the oldest European compositions based on a simple theme which repeats with a diversity of elaborate variations, while “Libertango” also has a repeated theme at its core. However, her own works all involved working with sampling technology to build up multiple layers of repeated content. While this is a technique that has been around pretty much as long as electronic synthesizers have been used, Walther brought an engagingly original approach to creating her samples, initiating their repetition, and then playing against the resulting fabric.

I must confess that, for the better part of the afternoon, I was so drawn into the music that it was a while before I became aware of Galvan’s dancing. His technique is the result of Butoh training, a style that shook up a lot of the dance community (both audiences and performers) when it first migrated out of Japan in the early-to-mid Sixties. One might almost say that Butoh shook up both performers and audiences the same which in which John Cage’s 4’33” shook up “new music” audiences. However, as the technique matured, it also became more refined; and Galvan provided an engaging account of the results of that refinement, some of which were provocative but most of which emerged from a refined foundation. Most interesting was the way in which the front row of the audience included “plants,” who served as “helpers” during Galvan’s performance in the second half of the program.

Having cited Cage, it would also be fair to observe that, in the spirit of Merce Cunningham’s choreography, dance and music co-existed in this performances. As Clive Barnes used to write (not always positively), Cunningham’s dancers would perform through Cage’s music, rather than to it. Yesterday afternoon’s performance provided an account of such co-existence at its best. Hopefully, more opportunities to experience this approach will arise.