San Francisco Chronicle
By Joshua Kosman
October 24, 2021
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Because of COVID, nothing is quite the same as what it was, or what it was meant to be. We’re on a whole alternate timeline now.
Stated that bluntly, the point might seem obvious to the point of banality. But a couple of weekend nights spent savoring the offerings of San Francisco Performances’ invaluable Pivot Festival — the annual starburst of provocative new music and dance — drove home just how thoroughly the pandemic has bent the creative arc, in ways that promise to reverberate for years.
On Friday, Oct. 22, the Living Earth Show and Post:ballet premiered “Lyra,” a mesmerizing wordless meditation on mythology and nature that was originally planned as a full theatrical presentation. Instead, the piece was transmuted into a hybrid of film, dance and live music, its creative impulses shunted off into new channels.
The next evening in Herbst Theatre, violinist Jennifer Koh and pianist-composer Missy Mazzoli performed an hour’s worth of beautiful miniatures, like suave musical bonsai shaped to the restrictive contours of the creators’ lockdown living rooms.
The two programs didn’t necessarily share much in the way of musical language (the first two evenings of the festival were given over to performances by singer-composer Theo Bleckmann, tenor Nicholas Phan and the string quartet Brooklyn Rider). But both showed the creative effects of the limitations imposed by the pandemic.
The roughly hour-long “Lyra,” presented in the first of two performances in the Taube Atrium Theater, clearly has a narrative underpinning. In choreographer Vanessa Thiessen’s lithe ensembles and expressive lifts and turns, you can make out appearances by the Fates, or Persephone, or Orpheus and Eurydice reaching out to one another in wordless anguish.
Yet the fluid blend of inputs — which also includes swooping, kinetic camerawork by cinematographer Benjamin Tarquin and elusive staging by director Robert Dekkers — quickly becomes its own self-referential subject matter. Like “Playing Changes,” the program of filmed dance that Post:ballet created with the San Francisco Symphony during the depths of the pandemic, this is a work that now explores the question, “In the absence of the usual resources, what can we do?”
One answer lies in the combination of dance and nature, as scene after scene unfolds in a setting of forest glades, desert rocks and mountain pools. At one particularly powerful juncture, a dancer takes an elegantly choreographed backward tumble into the water’s welcoming embrace — a moment you could never experience so intimately on a proscenium stage.
Another lies in the combination of live music and filmed dance. Samuel Adams’ serenely spacious score — mostly gentle, slightly rumpled harmonies with the occasional electronic overlay — gets a gorgeous, understated rendition by the Living Earth Show, the duo comprising guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson. (The piece is due for a recording in February.) It’s like a wry gloss on the more common setup of live dancers with taped accompaniment, and it all sets up a magnificent O. Henry ending that will certainly not be revealed here.
Saturday’s joint recital by Koh and Mazzoli played like a tour through an artist’s journal during adversity — a war, a plague, a time of political upheaval. Many of these short pieces grew out of commissioning projects that doubled as coping mechanisms, and you could hear the stresses etched into their surfaces.
I was most deeply enchanted by the opening selection, “Dissolve, O My Heart” — a piece for unaccompanied violin that keeps trying out new and slightly different harmonies before returning to a single bass note — and by the fierce outbursts and motoric rhythms of “Tooth and Nail.” But all the pieces gloried, even in necessarily compact form, in Mazzoli’s slightly offbeat harmonic language and her gift for inventive instrumental textures.
The pandemic, though far from over, has at least subsided enough to allow us to gather once more in public performance spaces. Now comes the slow, painstaking process of sifting through fallout of the past 20 months to see what emerges.
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