LYRA
The Living Earth Show and Post:ballet
Music by Samuel Adams (b. 1985)
In 2018, the lead artists of Lyra embarked on a series of intensive workshops, building the concepts for what was then intended to be a more conventional evening-length performance with live dancers on a proscenium stage. Although many of the core ideas behind the work remain, Lyra is now an entirely different piece, one that utilizes the new visual language Post:ballet and cinematographer Benjamin Tarquin have built as a response to the shapeshifting challenges of COVID-19, synthesized here within the context of live performance. In this sense, the resulting multi-layered, hybrid digital/live experience reflects both the sustained efforts of a growing team of Bay Area collaborators as well as a timely response to the moment.
Lyra is rooted in the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, lovers whose idyllic union is broken by Eurydice’s sudden death. Granted the possibility for reunification, Orpheus journeys to the underworld to return Eurydice to the world of the living, only to lose her once again. This 65-minute production, with its myriad refrains and constellation-like form, owes its debts to L’Orfeo, Claudio Monteverdi’s 1607 operatic setting of the myth. However, the artists’ decision to capture the ballet in the arid landscapes of Eastern California excites a new exploration of how the themes of love, loss, trust, and fallibility provide insight into more urgent issues concerning technology and the natural world.
The Music
Lyra brings to life hybrid digital-acoustic atmospheres that surround the musicians, revealing a composer who is invested in exploring the dramatic potential of technology in ways that highlight, rather than diminish, the resonant beauty of acoustic instruments. Samuel Adams’s score imagines percussionist Andy Meyerson and guitarist Travis Andrews as a single hyperinstrument — a 21st century lyre — whose plucked and hammered sounds are mirrored with layers of computer-generated, just-intoned resonance. The result is music that straddles the fragile and often imperceptible line between earthly and digital realms.
With Lyra, Adams creates a unique dialect that displays the harmonic voicings and melodic inflections of American jazz, the long-range formal planning of Western European concert music, and the glitchy, unpredictable phrase structures of electronic music. The score also reveals a composer deeply influenced by a sense of place and space. Utilizing the expressive possibilities of Meyer Sound’s spatial sound technology Spacemap Go, the characters of these arid and austerely beautiful landscapes are viscerally heard as the auras of Hades, Olympus, and the rivers of the Greek underworld by way of swirling reverberations, pulsating overtones, and extreme juxtapositions between digital walls of noise and the atmospheric soundscapes of the American West.
At the core of this storytelling lies the virtuosity and multiple intelligences of percussionist Andy Meyerson and guitarist Travis Andrews of The Living Earth Show. Forged in the classical tradition, this intrepid San Francisco-based duo has spent over a decade wrenching open the creative possibilities of percussion and electric guitar and providing the space for artists to make their most ambitious statements. In The Living Earth Show, Adams found the ideal partners to realize a work that incorporates every aspect of his practice and displays his diverse musical language. In this sense, Lyra exhibits a composition that is at once his most personal and his most collaborative.
Adams constructed much of the music in the room with the Post:ballet movement artists. This symbiotic relationship is omnipresent in the score, from the opening 16-minute set of variations entitled Wedding, whose hypnotic formal repetitions were derived from the slowly-evolving phrase work developed in a 2018 workshop, to the eponymous pas-de-deux between Hades and Persephone, whose tempo Adams pulled from the natural gait of the dancers walking through space.
The final orchestration — scored for guitars, metallic percussion, a deconstructed drum kit, iPhone voice memos, atmospheric field recordings, contrabass and piano samples, and a panoply of digital sounds — is performed from memory by The Living Earth Show.
The Movement
The choreography of Lyra evolved from a literary and thematic character exploration, from the canon of Orpheus-inspired texts to phrase-based movement generation in which the artists of Post:ballet developed a physical language unique to the qualities of each character. The process of movement generation began in 2018 and continued remotely throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Choreographer Vanessa Thiessen worked intimately with the dance artists to develop the core material for the work. Responding to Thiessen’s prompts and bringing their own experiences into the creative process, the resulting performances are both deeply personal and broadly impactful.
Using the music as both a motivator of movement and a container for the narrative, the lead artists wove the music, movement, and film together to tell a story that reflects the world in which it was created. This collaborative development process, along with the extension of classical technique into contemporary movement and the transfer of performance from the stage to the outdoors, offers a new perspective of what’s possible in contemporary dance.
The Film
Having worked primarily with street dancers in outdoor settings over the course of his career with YAK Films, cinematographer Benjamin Tarquin has accumulated a wealth of experience creating dynamic and mesmerizing dance films using only natural light. With Lyra, this knowledge is put on display in the luminous landscapes of the Sierra Nevada foothills and along the corridor between Bishop and Alabama Hills in Inyo County, California, which borders Nevada. The film was shot there in the summer of 2021.
Utilizing film in the context of a work for dance provides the collaborators unparalleled artistic agency in capturing, illustrating, and transforming narrative, movement, and setting. Mesmerizing drone shots with distinct color palettes become characters in their own right, and Tarquin’s use of slow motion allows time itself to become a flexible, manipulable element of the choreography. The presentation of extended takes, the focus on detail-oriented closeups, and the use of a handheld camera allow the audience to experience movement with a level of intimacy that only film can provide.