In the semi-darkness, the performance space is delineated by vintage lamps, electrical cords, potted plants and the seated audience encircling the artists as they create an avant-garde and surreal soundscape and visual experience. Graveyards and Gardens is ethereal and cryptic, but ultimately thought-provoking. Composer Caroline Shaw combines human voices with repetitive mechanical clicks of a tape deck, electronic beats and digital looping while choreographer Vanessa Goodman transpose the aural sensations into physical movements as she lurches, writhes, shakes and twitches.
Although one signifies death and the other represents rebirth, together graveyards and gardens symbolize the cycle of life. You can’t have one without the other and this theme mirrors the mesmerizing looping of the techno soundscape. All things, new and old, animate and inanimate are interconnected and part of a whole.
Graveyards and Gardens also examines the reconstruction of memories and how they are remembered by the human body and collected in inanimate objects. This motif resonates with the audience as they hum together in the warm glow of the antique lamps and contemplate on memories recorded on clicking mechanical devices and other organic and non-organic vessels holding past experiences.
Presented by Music on Main and SFU Woodward’s Cultural Program, Graveyards and Gardens is a beautiful ruminative meditation on life and death and the passage of time crystallised as memories.
