Review: Graveyards and Gardens builds a mesmerizing world of sound and dance
Artists Vanessa Goodman and Caroline Shaw build dreamlke atmosphere with retro speakers, turntables, and tape decks
Vanessa Goodman in Graveyards and Gardens. Photo by David Cooper
Presented by Music on Main as a PuSh partner on January 28 and 29
VANESSA GOODMAN AND CAROLINE Shaw’s new Graveyards and Gardens is an electrically atmospheric new sound-and-dance work that hits the rare sweet spot between experimental and accessible.
The set’s little stations of potted plants, homey lamps, and assorted vintage sound machines—tape decks, portable record players, Orange Crush amps—feel as familiar as your grandparents’ rec room.
Within this strange and inviting space, the two inspired artists have found room to play. Shaw, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American musician and composer, and Goodman, a magnetic force on Vancouver’s dance scene, created the commission by Music on Main and EMPAC.
As stated in Shaw’s remote introduction on a black-and-white portable TV set, the two collaborators are out to construct a place “where things fold in on other things”. Goodman moves within a circle of thick industrial-orange electrical cord, wielding everything from looping pedals to a turntable where she uses her fingers to slow down and warp baroque string music. Sometimes the soundscape washes over her, triggering movement: glitched ocean waves, scratchy Edison wax recordings, and cascading vocoder-altered vocals.
Photo by David Cooper
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.
Shot vividly from multiple camera angles, this streamed broadcast worked viscerally—with your flatscreen TV and speakers cranked for the full effect.
In it, Goodman proves herself beyond adept at navigating the system of sound-making and -altering that Shaw has set up. Most striking is her haunting vocal work on a microphone, layering to dazzling effect with Shaw’s own amplified, crystalline voice. The aural experiments will by turns make you think of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” and the vocal techscapes of Holly Herndon. It’s spine-tingling. (Because of the pandemic, the American composer couldn’t be on hand live to perform and manipulate the score, as originally planned. Kate de Lorme and Eric Chad’s sound design helped enormously to translate the aural effects to the the livestream.)
Goodman’s dance channels and responds to the music in loose and nonliteral ways—in exactly the “delicate magnetic rhythms” Shaw describes in a section of chanted text. The percussive chugs of sampled industrial machines send Goodman into mechanical movement, her fingers pressing, picking, and turning; as voices circle and echo, she swirls along with them, with the orange cord winding around her.
Some of the most effective moments are driven by everyday noises. You know how every old lamp has its own distinct sound when it clicks on and off—some metallic and some clunky and wooden? And how that click can instantly take you to a place and time in your memory—an old cottage on the lake, or a childhood bedroom? Goodman and Shaw play with that idea, using loopers and sound-activation technology to build an entire percussive light orchestra.
Like so many other parts of this mesmerizing show, the light-switch sequence takes a simple idea into a more dreamlike realm—made all the more transportive by James Proudfoot’s lighting, which swings from a speakeasy-sepia to a lens-flare saturation.
Slowly, Graveyards and Gardens evolves from a meditation on the glitching and mechanical to the importance of reconnecting with the natural—literally, soil—and a kind of transcendance.
“How do we recalibrate after someone is gone?” Shaw’s voice asks at one point over the speakers, and you can almost feel the shudder of grief that shoots through Goodman’s limbs as she leans awkwardly off-axis. That loss of balance and that constant drive to recalibrate are ideas that make this work resonate so fiercely right now.
We’re all trying to adapt, adjust, and correct, every second of every uncertain day of pandemic life. Fortunately, there are triumphs like this that can find meaning in it all, and transport us even when we’re stuck at home.
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.
Related Articles
