Graveyards and Gardens
The body as a living archive as we construct and decompose.
"Graveyards and Gardens" is a collaborative performance installation conceived, created and performed by composer Caroline Shaw and choreographer Vanessa Goodman with lighting design by James Proudfoot and audio design by Eric Chad and Kate De Lorme. Co-produced by Shaw and Goodman, this new work examines memory as a process of reconstruction rather than an exact recall of fixed events, embracing the various elaborations, distortions, and omissions.
"A dance. A concert. A curious analogue driven performance experience. A visual and sonic album of reconstructed memories and distortions. Revealed in an immersive environment of nature and technology. The warm glow lure of antiquated innovations and embodied experience. It’s a living album that continues to fold and unfold into itself. Digging deep into the beauty of how the body remembers."
Text quoted from Nicole Mion
Co-commissioned by Music on Main and EMPAC. Created with the generous support from The Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, Lēna, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Action at a Distance, SFU Woodwards Cultural Programing Unit, The Scotiabank Dance Centre and CCOV.
“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..”
