date completed
2021
duration
30'
instrumentation
solo violin and electronics
produced with
Post:ballet and San Francisco Symphony
digital premiere
March 2022
A series of seven pieces performed by Post:ballet dancers with SF Symphony Associate Principal Second Violin Helen Kim, Playing Changes is an exploration of collaborative art during a time marked by isolation and uncertainty, and a celebration of the resilience and creativity of the Bay Area artistic community. All works were filmed at Oakland’s historic 16th Street Station and feature the choreography of Robin Dekkers, with cinematography and editing by Benjamin Tarquin.
Contributing composers: Samuel Adams, Ambrose Akinmusire, Philip Glass, Mary Kouyoumdjian, Elizabeth Ogonek, Daniel Bernard Roumain, and LJ White
press
There’s a deft little grammatical switcheroo operating in the title of “Playing Changes,” the mesmerizingly beautiful new virtual offering from the San Francisco Symphony and Post:ballet. In the obvious reading, the phrase refers to the musical practice of exploring a chord progression, or “changes.”
But read it instead as a noun followed by a verb, and you’ve got a timely reminder of how the COVID-19 pandemic has altered our cultural practices. This 30-minute video combining music, dance and cinematography — available free on Thursday, March 4, as part of the SFSymphony+ platform — is a fervid, swirling response to the constraints of life during quarantine.
That means that the project both defies and celebrates those limitations. The seven short pieces are all scored for a single unaccompanied violin (the astoundingly gifted Helen Kim, whose day job is as the associate principal in the Symphony’s second violin section) and Robert Dekkers’ fluid, hypercharged choreography uses one or two dancers for each.
The performances are filmed in Oakland’s expansive 16th Street Station, and Ben Tarquin’s cinematography revels in all that room. He sends his camera circling hungrily around the performers — now cutting in for details, now pulling back to get a sense of the spaces involved.
Kim stands in one place as the dancers move through the performance space, but her presence amid the proceedings is always a consideration. The result is something we might call an aesthetic of social distancing, in which the emptiness between performers becomes part of the artistic palette.
That point becomes most clear in the two duets on the program. The world premiere of composer Mary Kouyoumdjian’s “Water and Dust,” a feast of string passagework and gradually shifting rhythmic patterns, is paired with an athletic and breathlessly elegant pas de deux for Charmaine Butcher and Babatunji Johnson. Earlier, Dekkers and Cora Cliburn use the frenetic scales from Philip Glass’ “Einstein on the Beach” as a vehicle for mirrored dance figures executed at a safe distance.
There are other delights here as well, including “fly, into the light …” by composer LJ White, a soulful meditation tinged with Celtic overtones, which dancer Emily Hansel matches with slow, sculpted spins and dips.
For “Filter,” Daniel Bernard Roumain’s vibrant violin tribute to the blues, Christian Squires responds with an equally high-impact dance of crisp poses and feverish transitions.
Best of all, there’s a palpable sense of collaborative closeness running through the entire suite. Everyone remains at arm’s length, but no one misses a beat. Not even a pandemic, evidently, can keep these artists from working in tandem.
San Francisco Chronicle ↗