2021 in review: A few of the year's most memorable moments in Vancouver theatres and galleries—live and online
Music on Main and the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, online, January
Dance artist Vanessa Goodman’s collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw was one of the best streamed productions of the year. Goodman moved amid a cozy rumpus-room circle of potted plants, homey lamps, Orange Crush amps, and assorted other vintage sound machines. But no moment was quite as exhilarating as when Goodman vocalized into the microphone, a vocoder warping the sound as it echoed and looped through the space and beyond, out across the interweb, layering to dazzling effect with Shaw’s own pretaped crystalline voice. Mesmerizing.
“What happens when one of Vancouver’s most exciting contemporary-dance artists joins forces with one of America’s most innovative composers?
In quantifiable terms, 400 feet of orange sound cable, vintage record and cassette players, thrift-store lamps, and lush green houseplants. All of them create the rich physical world for their hypnotically looping new dance-installation called Graveyards and Gardens..”
“We’ve always been talking about the idea of soil as a receiver of things that decay and a giver of things that can grow out of it,” Shaw says. “That’s also a kind of a metaphor for the music… The idea of things decomposing and becoming part of a fabric that ultimately yields something new—and sort of seeing the beauty of a graveyard as a kind of garden, and thinking about that musically.”
Graveyards and Gardens builds a mesmerizing world of sound and dance
“As much as you lose yourself in the fevered aural and visual aspects of this production, Graveyards and Gardens also has something important to say. It pushes into moving themes about how devices and bodies hold memory, and how the cycles of mortality ensure we’ll all return to the earth. […]
Watching it was bittersweet, however: you couldn’t help but think about how mindblowing it would have been to witness Graveyards and Gardens in a theatre, with all that sound coming at you from multiple directions. But don’t worry: this production is so strong it will go on to have a long life cycle, and loop back to us again.” - Janet Smith
Graveyards and Gardens brings process of creation to life
“Music on Main's Graveyards and Gardens, a mesmerizing coproduction featuring original choreography and dance by Vancouver's Vanessa Goodman juxtaposed with a musical story created and voiced by Pulitzer Prize–winning musician Caroline Shaw. […]
As I watched, I wondered where on Earth this kaleidoscope of sounds, phrases, flashing lamps, and singing bursts would take Goodman, whose sole presence on stage remains riveting throughout.
I'm not going to spoil the ending except to say it left me pondering the cycle of life, the history and evolution of music, and the entire process of artistic creation. All in less than an hour.” - Charlie Smith
Photos: Dayna Szyndrowski