Vanessa Goodman and Caroline Shaw’s Graveyards and Gardens loops and echoes its way back to the live stage
The immersive sound-and-dance piece has hit symphony and skateboard spaces before circling back to Vancouver—lamps, amps, and all
Vanessa Goodman and Caroline Shaw in Graveyards and Gardens Photo by Dayna Szyndrowski
Music on Main and SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs present Graveyards and Gardens from April 12 to 15 at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre in the SFU Woodward’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
SINCE DEBUTING ONLINE here in 2021, Vanessa Goodman and Caroline Shaw’s mesmerizing Graveyards and Gardens has filled an array of venues around the world with dance and echoing voices. Plus the eclectic assortment of vintage lamps, potted plants, tape decks, portable record players, Orange Crush amps, and 400 feet of cable that the performers interact with throughout the work.
One of the most unique locations has to have been Portland’s Bodecker Foundation skate bowl last year, presented by Third Angle New Music. With a key part of the show being Shaw and Goodman’s looping vocals, amplifiers were placed around the edge of the bowl, where audience members sat with legs dangling.
“The lamps couldn’t stand upright and [lighting director and audio codesigner] Eric Chad decided to lay them down, and there were twice as many,” Goodman recalls in a phone interview with Stir. “Then Caroline signed them and they auctioned them off.”
Goodman is speaking from a hotel in Seattle, where she’s performing Graveyards and Gardens in a much different setting this week: the Seattle Symphony’s experimental Octave 9 Raisbeck Music Center at Benaroya Hall. The state-of-the-art space with directional audio throughout its ceiling should make for a mindblowing immersive experience of Goodman and Shaw’s cascading vocoder-altered vocals, not to mention a soundscape of glitched ocean waves, scratchy Edison wax recordings, clocklike clicking, and more.
Graveyards and Gardens, the stunning exploration of mortality and the ever-looping life cycle, has had an incredible journey since Vancouverites watched it on a small screen at home in the late lockdown of January 21. That livestreamed production, presented by Music on Main as part of the PuSh fest, was necessitated mostly by the fact that Shaw—the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer—still could not cross the border due to shutdowns.
It’s amazing, looking back, to consider the critically acclaimed work was actually created almost entirely by remote in the darkest days of COVID isolation.
“I choreographed the piece in my living room and Caroline would send audio and video back and forth,” Goodman recalls. “She’d give me expert instructions on how to project my voice. It was definitely a challenge, but at the same time I think we were really proud of what we were able to do.”
At the time, the collaboration with Shaw pushed Goodman out of her comfort zone in ways that have had ripple effects in her own choreographies for her company Action at a Distance. “I never thought in a million years that I’d be singing in a piece,” she reflects. “Sound has always been a backbone of my work. Sonic vibrations move the hairs in our ears—they make the hairs in our ears dance, and it does something physiologically. So automatically you're asking the people watching to have a physical experience. In a sense, they’re dancing with us.”
In the new live version of Graveyards and Gardens, audiences will hear her voice rise and echo with Shaw’s in the space—sometimes plaintively, sometimes hauntingly, and often exhilaratingly. Shaw, an accomplished strings player, will also be performing on viola for this live rendition.
In Vancouver, the pair will present the work in the round in SFU Woodward’s Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, Goodman inhabiting a circle of little “stations” of potted plants, lamps, and analogue sound machines, audience members seated around that. Shaw will be situated mostly at her own sound station, altering and morphing musical notes, but Goodman has pushed her collaborator out of her comfort zone too: she hints the composer will move and dance in the space a bit too.
No two performances are ever quite the same, Goodman points out, preferring the term “generative performance systems” to “improvisation”: “There’s the structure of the work, and inside that there are paths and systems that we’re playing with and modulating for each show.” Inside that world is a journey that speaks to decomposition and growth, love, joy, and loss.
Similarly, Graveyards and Gardens continues regenerating in different places around the world. And where do its many integral props—all those orange cables, lamps, amps, and other props—live when Goodman and Shaw aren’t touring the show?
“There are multiple cupboards I’ve shoved them into at home, and my partner has a whole closet of audio cable and gear,” Goodman explains with a laugh. “And luckily, when we’re on tour, the venues provide the lamps and plants.”
Vanessa Goodman and Caroline Shaw in Graveyards and Gardens Photo by Dayna Szyndrowski
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