Arrow Street Arts,
Cambridge, Massachusetts
By John Short
While it is difficult to determine how exactly the body remembers, Vanessa Goodman and Carline Shaw’s work Graveyards and Gardens certainly offers a compelling contending answer. The show’s theme references how memory can be reconstructed (though perhaps in ways that are not exact recall) musically, visually, technologically, and experientially. Inside Arrow Street Art’s stunning black box theatre, an intrigued audience encountered a work that, while featuring music, dance, a sound collage, and a lightshow, was far more than the sum of its parts.
Upon the stage was an installation arranged in a circle made of orange cable with six distinct points that contained a lamp and a potted plant. Accompanying each lamp and plant was some sort of musical instrument or device, including a microphone, tape decks, vinyl players (with discs all coloured orange, a reference to Shaw’s earlier work “Orange”), a pedal board that could trigger loops or detune the live or pre-recorded music, a synthesizer, and a viola. Each of these instruments lent themselves to the show, along with an audio-design, arranged by Eric Chad and Kate De Lorne, that featured several recordings of music and speech/poetry. Some of these recordings included selections from Derek Lynch’s text “Soil is the Key to our Planet’s History (and Future)” recited with additions by Shaw and Goodman, a soothing recording of the Pacific Ocean, Chopin’s Etude in A Flat and Handel’s Israel in Egypt derived from two antique Edison wax recordings (that served as representatives of ‘the past’), the Allemande from Bach’s fourth Partita performed by pianist Amy Yang, Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto performed by Voices of Music, selections from Shaw’s Entr’acte performed by the Attacca Quartet, and looped pre-recorded singing by Goodman and Shaw.
At times, Shaw used her pedalboard to detune the more recently recorded music to sound akin to the Edison recordings, ultimately blurring the boundaries between what constituted sonic past and present. Additionally, she improvised on the viola and the synthesizer, and sang separately and together with Goodman, sometimes making use of a vocoder to create a powerful choir from their two complimentary voices. To see Shaw and Goodman sing together was something I hadn’t anticipated, and played quite a part in eroding the barrier between music and dance. I also wouldn’t have guessed that they would frequently invite the audience to sing with them, using a melody that referenced Chopin Etude in A flat, which further broke down the barrier between audience and performers and made for a more immersive performance.
The show itself was deeply embedded in elements of symbolism, even if these meanings were not immediately intelligible. These included the performer’s stark red and green jumpsuits, Goodman’s fore-grounding and placement stage right and Shaw’s backgrounding to stage left, the symbolic shuttering of lamps, and a purposeful control of light that often obscured the performer’s faces, giving one the impression that they too were parts of the installation.
As for the choreography of Graveyards and Gardens: there was a curious coordinated relationship to certain timbres and certain different types of body motion. For instance, when one would hear the looped clicking of a tape deck or any of the pre-recorded sounds that were more percussive, Goodman’s motion became rapid, aggressive, and jagged (almost akin to a toy soldier) whereas for other timbres that were more sustained, she offered more floral and fluid gestures, in accordance with the waves of the Pacific Ocean. A particularly striking moment in the performance, and what could be distinguished as the piece’s peak, was Goodman’s symbolic pouring of earth in a circle as Lynch’s lyric, “Return to Dirt” looped repeatedly through the sound system. Meanwhile Shaw impressively duetted with herself, laying down an organ texture on her synthesizer, and after looping this texture, improvising on the viola.
One thing that I found immensely refreshing about this show was the fluid balance between pre-coordinated music and choreography with improvisation that allowed the show a unique direction for each rendition. To return to the question of memory, there was something simultaneously familiar and new about Graveyards and Gardens, and without a doubt, memorable.
