The Not-So-Dynamic Duo of Shaw and Kahane

Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Kahane (from the San Francisco Performances event page for last night’s program)

Last night Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Kahane returned to Herbst Theatre to launch the Art of Song Series presented by San Francisco Performances. Both of them are vocalists, contributing both music and lyrics to the songs they presented. They are also both instrumentalists with Shaw playing viola and Kahane at a piano keyboard. In addition, each performer has a desk on the stage with objects on them that could serve for percussion.

The major work on the program was a joint composition effort entitled “Hexagons,” inspired by “The Library of Babel,” one of the stories that Jorge Luis Borges collected in his 1941 publication, El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan (the garden of forking paths). This was preceded by five individual songs, two by Shaw embedded among three by Kahane; and the last three of those songs were solo performances, the first by Shaw and the others by Kahane. Both performers were more than a little casual when it came to identifying the song titles; but, when Shaw delivered her solo, I jotted “deconstructed Tallis” in my program book!

Indeed, if I were to try to coin a category for the approach that both Shaw and Kahane take to performance (solo and duo), it would probably be “playful deconstruction.” However, the problem with this approach is that the performers seem to be the only ones having fun. They may relish each other’s insights and laugh at each other’s jokes, but none of that spirit ever spilled off the stage to engage the audience. As a result, the evening had far less to do with the mind-bending fictions of Borges and more to do with the Monty Python’s Complete Waste of Time computer game!