October 20 24, 2021

October 20–24, 2021

2 | PIVOT sfperformances.org

Sarah Cahill Moderator

Recently called “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times and “a brilliant and charismatic advocate for modern and contemporary composers” by Time Out New York, Sarah Cahill has commissioned, premiered, and recorded numerous compositions for solo piano. More than 60 com-posers have dedicated works to her, including John Adams, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Roscoe Mitchell, and Annea Lockwood. Recent appearances include San Francisco Symphony’s SoundBox, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Detroit Institute of the Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Carolina Performing Arts. Upcoming appearances include an all-day concert at the Barbican Centre in London, the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, and a collaboration with the San Francisco Girls Chorus and composer Theresa Wong. She was named a 2018 Champion of New Music, awarded by the American Composers Forum (ACF).

Her writing has appeared in The John Adams Reader, Contemporary Music Review, Keyboard Magazine, The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, Piano and Keyboard Magazine, Nonsequiturs (Frederic Rzewski), and the forthcoming Ecstatic Aperture: Perspectives on the Life and Work of Terry Riley. Her pre-concert talks and onstage interviews have been featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Cal Performances, and her joint interviews with Mere-dith Monk and Björk, and with Elliott Carter and Phil Lesh, are on Coun-terstream Radio. She is on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory. Her radio show, Revolutions Per Minute, which has recently featured two-hour interviews with John Adams, Kaija Saariaho, Roscoe Mitchell, and Meredith Monk, can be heard every Sunday evening from 6 to 8 pm on KALW, 91.7 FM in San Francisco.

sfperformances.org PIVOT | 3

THE LIVING EARTH SHOWTravis Andrews | Guitar Andy Meyerson | Percussion

and POST:BALLETSamuel Adams | ComposerRobert Dekkers | DirectorBenjamin Tarquin | FilmmakerVanessa Thiessen | Choreographer

Friday, October 22, 2021 | 7:30pm Sunday, October 24, 2021 | 5:00pm Taube Atrium Theater

Lyra (World Premiere)

Running time: 65 minutes, no intermission

Artistic Direction: Vanessa Thiessen, Benjamin Tarquin and Robert Dekkers

Music: Samuel Adams

Musicians: Travis Andrews (guitars) and Andy Meyerson (percussion)

Choreography: Vanessa Thiessen with significant contributions by the dance artists

Cinematography, Video Direction, and Editing: Benjamin Tarquin

Costume Design: Christian Squires

CostumeConstruction: Jan Berletti, Christopher Dunn and

Isabelle Burgess-Corkins

Makeup Design and ProductionAssistance: Mia J. Chong


Please join us after the performance for a brief Q&A with the artists and Sarah Cahill.

Lighting Design: David Robertson

Sound Design: Mark Grey

SpaceMap GoConsultants: Steve Ellison and Leonardo Blanche, Meyer Sound

CAST

Atropos: Emily Hansel

Clotho: Travis Andrews

Lachesis: Andy Meyerson

Orpheus: Babatunji Johnson

Eurydice: Moscelyne ParkeHarrison

Gods andGoddesses: Charmaine Butcher, Mia J. Chong, Caitlin Hicks,

Colleen Loverde, Jenna Marie, Anthony Pucci, Christian Squires

Cerberus: Mia J. Chong, Colleen Loverde, Anthony Pucci

Hades: Cora Cliburn

Persephone: Landes Dixon

Underworld Beings: Charmaine Butcher, Mia J. Chong, Caitlin Hicks,

Colleen Loverde, Jenna Marie, Anthony Pucci, Christian Squires

Lyra was made possible by the generous support of the following partners: San Francisco Performances, The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Meyer Sound, The Fleishhacker Foundation, and New Music USA.

Special Thanks to BAMPFA, Becca Brewer (Holistic Healing Facilitator), Tyler Benari, Berkeley Ballet Theater, Paul Dresher, Brenden Blaine Darby, Cody Enicke, Randy Griffin, Eddie Hicks, Matthew Kimball, Ali Taylor Lange, Helen and John Meyer, Javier Ochoa, Emre Ozdemir, Rolling Chef Catering, Derek Rushin, Robert Rushin, SF Dance Film Festival, Matthew “Wagz” VanWagner, and Vita Brevis Club.


ABOUT THE ARTISTSSan Francisco Performances presents The Living Earth Show for the second time. They first appeared in October 2017 with Kronos Quartet and Youth Speaks. Earlier this year, they created a program with composer Danny Clay for our online “Sanctuary” Series.

Post:ballet makes its SF Performances debut with Lyra.

The Living Earth Show: Celebrating 11 years of “outstanding” (San Francisco Chronicle) and “transcendent” (Charleston City Paper) performances, The Living Earth Show—guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyer-son—is a megaphone and canvas for the world’s most progressive artists. One of the premiere contemporary chamber ensembles in the United States, The Living Earth Show exists to push the boundaries of technical and artistic possi-bility while amplifying voices, perspectives, and bodies that the classical music tradition has often excluded. The organization uses the tools of experimental classical music to facilitate the creation of their collaborators’ most ambitious musical visions and create work that reflects and responds to our world.

The organization’s most recent live season (2019–20) included performances at the Spoleto Festival USA, Sutro Baths (Tremble Staves: a collaboration with the National Parks Service), Davies Symphony Hall (a collaboration with the San Francisco Girls’ Chorus), The Met Cloisters (Lordship & Bondage: The Birth of the Negro Superman: a collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art), and ODC Theater for a presentation of a festival in honor of The Living Earth Show’s 10th anniversary.

Committed to supporting the next generation of artistic thinkers, The Living Earth Show has been in residence at the Clarice Center at the University of


Maryland (2020–21), Stanford University (2019), the University of Michigan Center for World Performance Studies (2019), University of California Davis (2018), and University of South Carolina (2018).

The Living Earth Show has released numerous critically acclaimed albums, including M. Lamar’s Lordship & Bondage: The Birth of the Negro Superman (2019) and the mixed repertoire compendiums Dance Music (2016) and High Art (2013). Upcoming productions include Sahba Aminkia’s Shahnameh: Book of Kings, Sarah Hennies and Terry Berlier’s A Kind of Ache, and the debut album by COMMANDO: a nü metal project organized by The Living Earth Show foregrounding some of the most legendary LGBTQIA POC rap-pers, singers, and yellers in the country.

Post:ballet is a contemporary dance company based in Berkeley, CA found-ed by Artistic Director Robert Dekkers in 2009. Dedicated to creating inter-disciplinary works that push artistic boundaries and challenge social norms, Dekkers and Resident Choreographer Vanessa Thiessen’s collaborative approach to dance making results in works that are “decidedly daring and always beautifully performed” (SF Arts Monthly). Integrating the company’s classically trained dancers with composers, animators, architects, cinematog-raphers, designers, and sculptors, Post:ballet has been presented at Jacob’s Pillow’s Inside/Out Festival, SF International Arts Festival, Seattle’s Against the Grain Festival, SF Frameline Film Festival, and SF Dance Film Festival.

Now in its 12th Season, Post:ballet has proven its ability to successfully innovate through an ever-changing landscape for arts organizations, using constraints as a catalyst for creativity. Since the pandemic began, Post:ballet has produced several films including: Playing Changes, co-presented with SF Symphony featuring choreography set to seven works for solo violin, includ-ing three original commissions; La Folia, presented by the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; A Natural History of Vacant Lots, present-ed by SF Trolley Dances in collaboration with The Living Earth Show; Shaker Loops, presented by Berkeley Symphony; and Waltz of the Snowflakes, a short film of contemporary choreography set to Tchaikovsky’s score and filmed in an abandoned section of the Alameda waterfront, which has been viewed over 300,000 times on YouTube since its November 2020 premiere.

In 2019, Post:ballet became the official company of Berkeley Ballet Theater, where Dekkers serves as Artistic Director. Founded in 1981 with a mission to ensure all interested dancers can pursue rigorous pre-professional ballet training regardless of gender, race, socioeconomic status, or body type, Berkeley Ballet Theater prioritizes teaching ballet in a nurturing, inclusive, and forward-thinking environment. Combined with Post:ballet’s continued commitment to equitable hiring practices and intentional collaboration with diverse and exceptional artists, the company and school are in a unique posi-tion to meaningfully ask “what’s next” for ballet, training tomorrow’s dancers and bringing together some of today’s most groundbreaking working artists.

Samuel Adams (composer) is an American composer whose music weaves acoustic and digital sound into “mesmerizing” (New York Times) orches-


trations. His recent work explores the expressive possibilities of resonance through digital manipulations of acoustic instruments.

Adams grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area where he studied and per-formed improvised and electronic music. In 2010, he received a master’s de-gree in composition from The Yale School of Music and moved to Brooklyn, NY where he taught and performed in various contemporary music ensem-bles before returning to his native California in 2016.

Sought after by orchestras and contemporary ensemble alike, he has re-ceived commissions from a broad range of organizations including San Francisco Symphony, Carnegie Hall, New World Symphony, The Australian Chamber Orchestra, and Spektral Quartet, and has collaborated with con-ductors such as Esa-Pekka Salonen, Karina Canellakis, MTT, violinists Antho-ny Marwood, Jennifer Koh, Karen Gomyo, and pianists Emanuel Ax, Sarah Cahill, David Fung, and Joyce Yang.

Adams’s upcoming projects include new works for The Australian Chamber Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony, Alma Quartet, and pianist Conor Hanick.

Adams was Mead Composer in Residence with the Chicago Symphony Or-chestra from 2015 to 2018 and in the 2021–22 season will be the Composer in Residence with Het Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, where he will reside for three months. He has held residencies at Civitella Ranieri (Umbria, IT), Djerassi Resident Artists Program (California, USA), Ucross (Wyoming, USA), and Visby International Centre for Composers (Gotland, SE). He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow and lives and works in Oakland, CA.

Vanessa Thiessen (choreographer and co-director) is a choreographer, artis-tic collaborator, and educator. Resident Choreographer for Post:ballet since 2017, her works include La Folia, Hades and Persephone, Junction, Laven-der Country (nominated for Best Dance Performance 2019 by SF Classical Voice), and co-choreographed works with Robert Dekkers include Incandes-cent Body, From Now On (Dance Theater of San Francisco), and Dear Light Along the Path to Nothingness (Grand Rapids Ballet).

From 2013–2015, Thiessen worked alongside ODC/Dance Co-Director KT Nelson, generating choreography for Sacramento Ballet, Owen/Cox Dance, RAWdance, and for Chris Mason Johnson’s dance film From the Beginning. In 2018, she created From the Well of Echoes for Berkeley Ballet Theater in collaboration with the Berkeley Symphony, and in 2019, she created Left for BodyVox JAG in collaboration with the Portland Youth Symphony.

Thiessen teaches at Reed College, BodyVox, Open Space and Berkeley Ballet Theater. She danced professionally with Post:ballet, Skinner/Kirk, Amy Seiwert’s Imagery, Project B., ODC/Dance (where she was nominated for an Isadora Duncan award for her performance in They’ve Lost Their Footing), Smuin Ballet, and Oregon Ballet Theatre.

Benjamin Tarquin (cinematographer, editor, and co-director) is an inter-national videographer, photographer, and editor, at the intersection of the


classical arts, documentary, and street dance. Based part of the year in Japan and part of the year in his hometown Oakland, CA, Tarquin uses visual and electronic media to synthesize movement, light, and acoustics into new and evocative artistic expression.

Tarquin grew up to the sounds of the Oakland underground before studying architecture at La Villette in Paris, France. His experience in design led him over the last decade to help build YAK Films into an internationally acclaimed video production company capturing new forms of street dance emerging from the United States, Europe, and Asia. Several viral videos brought this youth-led artistic and political content to the cultural mainstream, giving in-ner-city youth a powerful and constructive outlet and helping to establish an international street dance scene. In this capacity, Tarquin collaborated with high-profile artists like Lil’ Buck and Les Twins on projects for clients like Sony, Redbull, Adidas, Yonex and Apple. YAK Films has over a million subscribers on YouTube.

His more recent work under Yabe Media expands beyond street dance to produce music videos, short films, and commercials. He has collaborated with Post:ballet since 2019 on projects including Waltz of the Snowflakes, Playing Changes, and Swan Lake, taking a fresh perspective to ballet.

Robert Dekkers (co-director) is dedicated to inspiring artists and audiences with their passion for movement and collaboration. Named “25 To Watch” by DANCE Magazine and celebrated for their direction of multi-disciplinary works that are “inventive, focused, sophisticated, and anything but risk averse” by SF Chronicle, Dekkers is also Artistic Director of Berkeley Ballet Theater, the official school of Post:ballet.

Dekkers danced professionally with Ballet Arizona, ODC/Dance, Company C Contemporary Ballet, and Diablo Ballet, where they were nominated for an Isadora Duncan Award for “Outstanding Performance–Individual” in 2013. They danced leading roles in works by George Balanchine, Twyla Tharp, José Límon, KT Nelson, Val Caniparoli, Lar Lubovitch, Jodie Gates, Trey McIntyre, Dominic Walsh, Julia Adam, and Paul Taylor. Dekkers’ choreography has been presented at Jacob’s Pillow, SF International Arts Festival, Tanzsommer Festival, Ballet Builders Showcase, Against the Grain Festival, and WestWave Dance Festival. Commissions include SF Dance Film Festival, AXIS Dance Company, Kansas City Ballet, Atlanta Ballet, sjDANCEco, Smuin Ballet, Grand Rapids Ballet (with co-choreographer Vanessa Thiessen), and Diablo Ballet, where they were resident choreographer from 2013–2018. They are currently Director of Choreography for Art Haus, a performance collective that has presented large-scale collaborations in Black Rock City including Dekkers’ Firebird, Rite of Spring, and We, Human.

Dekkers recently co-choreographed a scene for Starz Network’s Blindspot-ting with Lil Buck and Jon Boogz, performing in the scene together with these artists and the Post:ballet dancers for the series’ season finale. Dekkers has created new works for the dance departments at Stanford Universi-ty, Southern Methodist University, San Jose State University, and Virginia


Commonwealth University, and regularly teaches company classes for AXIS Dance Company, Smuin Ballet, LINES Ballet, and ODC/Dance. They also hold a degree in business from Rio Salado College.

ABOUT LYRAIn 2018, the lead artists embarked on a series of intensive workshops, build-ing 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:bal-let 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, this 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 fallibil-ity 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 dramat-ic 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 one 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 pos-sibilities of Meyer Sound’s spatial sound technology Spacemap Go, the char-acters 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 juxtaposi-


tions 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 per-cussion 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 composi-tion 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 hyp-notic formal repetitions were derived from the slowly evolving phrase work Thiessen developed in a 2018 workshop, to the eponymous pas-de-deux be-tween 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 decon-structed drum kit, iPhone voice memos, atmospheric field recordings, contra-bass and piano samples, and a panoply of digital sounds—is performed this evening 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 remote-ly 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 experi-ences 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 exten-sion 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 dis-


play in the luminous landscapes of the Sierra Nevada foothills and along the corridor between Bishop and Alabama Hills in Inyo County, where the film was shot in the summer of 2021.

Utilizing film in the context of a work for dance provides the collaborators un-paralleled 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 move-ment with a level of intimacy that only film can provide.

Movements

1 Wedding Full Company

I—unison II—delay III—ricochet IV—split V—multiply VI—rise VII—fall VIII—unison

2 Interlude no. 1 Atropos

3 Field Orpheus, Eurydice, Atropos

4 Surface Down Orpheus, Eurydice

5 Interlude no. 2 Eurydice

6 Canopy Orpheus, Cerberus

7 Hades and Persephone Hades, Persophone

8 Ritornello Orpheus, Eurydice

9 Gymnopédie Hades, Persephone, Orpheus, Eurydice

10 River Full Company

11 Interlude no. 3 Hades, Orpheus, Eurydice

12 Surface Up Full Company

Documents

October 20 24, 2021