Circulatory Systems
Caroline Shaw and Vanessa Goodman dig into sound, memory, and the body in their dance performance piece, Graveyards and Gardens
By Jesse Locke, 03/25/22.
photo by Dana Szyndrowski.
Bodies built for repetition / delicate magnetic ribbons / wind around this mortal coil / as everything returns to soil
These evocative rhyming phrases loop throughout Graveyards and Gardens, the spellbinding collaboration from Vancouver-based dancer Vanessa Goodman and acclaimed American composer Caroline Shaw. In 2013, Shaw became the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, leading to her work with Kanye West. Shaw and Goodman’s multimedia performance piece is presented in a stylized, minimalist space with bright orange cables creating the boundary around clusters of analog audio devices, lamps, and potted house plants. Like the Dogme 95 film movement, its displacement from a traditional set shifts the focus onto the interactions of sound, memory, and the body.
Throughout the nearly hour-long piece, Goodman’s repetitive, mechanical movements are synched with the whirs and clicks of a tape recorder so they become inextricably linked. Shaw’s score shifts between insistent rhythms and vocals drenched in effects from the Helicon voice processor, creating an effect reminiscent of Imogen Heap’s 2005 hit “Hide and Seek.” Spectral melodies from Chopin and Handel swim in the static of a wax cylinder with the eerie ambience of The Caretaker — another artist toying with memory. Eventually Goodman picks up the microphone herself, holding elongated notes against a backdrop of guttural throat noises, Meredith-Monk-like wordless utterances, and gently lapping waves. After sinking her hands into one of the plants’ soil, Goodman’s gestures become larger, leaping and twirling around the sound stations like she’s reawakening in real time.
“Both of us were quite interested in repetition, how things degrade, and also regenerate,” explains Goodman during a joint Zoom call with Shaw. “Revealing the objects we used and demystifying how things are made is a really wonderful way to include people in the magic of performance. We wanted it to feel like a cozy basement rec room where you might create the work.”
Graveyards and Gardens has its roots in a shorter, improvised piece commissioned while Shaw was the composer-in-residence at Vancouver’s Music on Main. Artistic Director David Pay invited her and Goodman to work together for a 2015 event co-presented by Dances For A Small Stage. Though they were only given a few hours to assemble an original work, the chemistry between the performers was palpable as Shaw’s robotic vocal loops gained flesh through Goodman’s marionette-like movements. “We had a really short amount of time,” Shaw says, “but I think we both responded to each other’s work and felt ‘this is a person I want to make things with.’”
Over the next seven years, the duo were granted opportunities to continue their collaboration in a variety of different settings, including another weeklong Vancouver residency and two weeks together at the Banff Centre. “That was the turning point,” says Goodman. “In Banff, we got access to a large room where we were able to spread out and try things, which is when it started to congeal. We started displaying all of the cabling in the circle as a practicality to connect everything, then fell in love with the way it looked.”
One of the primary themes of Graveyards and Gardens is interrogating memories that evolve or distort over time. By adding filters and distortion to the music played on analog devices, Shaw’s score represents this phenomenon through the effect of degraded sound. “In my work, I’m interested in units of memory,” she explains. “I like using older fragments of a familiar song — whether it’s a folk song or a piece of classical music — anything that’s been lodged in your brain in a particular way, and then making it into a musical object. You experience that differently either through repetition or recurrence. It’s like a refrain; something that keeps coming back.”
When asked how her dance movements in the piece play into its concepts of personal history, Goodman describes her body as a “house for sound”, where music can be filtered through memory and transform into something very different from its source. She continues to explain how the body’s muscle memory can be seen as another layer of technology that degrades over time, while also developing fresh neuromuscular pathways to regenerate in its own way.
“My body is a living archive,” says Goodman. “Everyone I’ve worked with has left some information that’s stored in my system and is reflected in different ways. I think there’s beauty to honouring that history, unfolding it in a similar way to how sampling works in music. As you start to distort it and play with it, it becomes your own. Information travels through different devices, whether they’re bodies, recording technology, or mediums of art used to showcase it.”
Beyond their aesthetic purposes, making the intimate piece feel like it’s taking place in a living room, the house plants used in Graveyards and Gardens represent the organic side of decomposition, returning to the soil just like our bodies will. During her childhood in Toronto, Goodman frequently rode her bike around Mount Pleasant cemetery. This historic arboretum is the final resting place of pianist Glenn Gould, Ojibwe visual artist Cecil Youngfox, and Canada’s first female surgeon, Jennie Smillie Robertson. Shaw has similarly pleasant associations from her time in New Haven, Connecticut, where she considered a cemetery to be her “private garden.”
“There’s a quiet peace to cemeteries, but in the spring they start to bud and explode with all of the flowers people leave there,” says Goodman. “Every garden is like a graveyard in the sense that plants can totally disappear after a growth season, or they can return to the soil and re-emerge again. Our own bodies totally decompose if we’re not embalmed, so we also regenerate in that sense.”
Graveyards and Gardens will have its own opportunity to bloom during a series of upcoming performances in Edmonton and Portland, followed by its American and European debuts. While the world premiere took place in Vancouver during the pandemic, Calgary audiences will be treated to its inaugural presentation featuring both artists performing in the same room. “Something really exciting about the work for me is that it’s not fixed,” says Goodman. “It can be held for specific communities in specific ways, and doesn’t even have to be a performance. That could mean an installation or something tangible you can hold. It could become an album, a book, or even a thumb drive of loops.”
As the dangers of environmental devastation become more urgent with each passing year, it is crucial to understand how our everyday actions speed up or slow down the physical world breaking down around us. While they don’t address these issues directly in Graveyards and Gardens, the piece’s subtext hints at the clash and synergy found in digital, analog, and organic sources. For everyone sharing the earth’s soil, the future will be found in decomposition and regeneration.
“We talk a lot about the air and less about the ground beneath our feet,” Shaw concludes. “What we need to think about is what we’re putting into the soil that we have to be able to use to grow things. It’s one of those quiet things underneath us that matters so much. This could have become a sad, tragic piece, but we were constantly trying to find spaces for celebration. That’s the garden quality. There can still be joy in the way we communicate and share music with each other.”
