Typically, a classical music concert is an audial experience: one in which the audience is guided through the contours of a symphony or lulled into a contemplative mood by a chamber orchestra. Music can do far more, of course. The nonprofit Spectacle Collective’s performance of Luz & Leyendas at the Black Box Theater at the Boston Center for the Arts this past Friday, Saturday, and Sunday is a perfect example of how the amalgamation of art forms, when executed with cultural sensitivity, can illumine sensory vistas and, in the case of Luz & Leyendas, dialectic dreamscapes.
Whereas theatrical performances with musical accompaniment usually situate an orchestra in a pit, the quartet that we heard (that became a sextet) occupied an equal portion of the ground-level stage, directly to the left of a square screen on which shadow puppetry told an almost surreal folktale of creativity and self-discovery with the Andean Mountain Range as the principal setting.
As the program notes state, throughout the performance the audience “may recognize some symbols of Andean culture: the elusive puma, the panpipe or zampoña, the llama-like vicuña, the armadillo, the charango (a guitar-like instrument traditionally made from the armadillo’s body), and the Andean condor, the national symbol of Chile.” The orchestration provides the soundtrack (which transcends the mere incidental) to an intricate, phantasmal excursion that ends where it begins, although a salient transformation has occurred in the process.
We followed the dreams (and sometimes the nightmares) of the main character, played with poise and fluid movement by Lauren Foster (known only as “Girl”), as she drew the audience through hypnogogic landscapes. Her demiurgic dreams — squelched at times by what we assume are her parents, depicted in a brilliant shadow play of clasping hands that formed a heart that eventually separate and wrench her in wild, conflicting directions, and in another moment by the critical gesticulation of staid, open palms attempting to halt her burgeoning visions — eventually soar beyond the summit of the Andes as she metaphysically merged with the condor: her primal, inner pulse. She became the metaphorical phoenix emerging from a broken lullaby. She cavorted on what can only be described as the thin cusp of the physical and the Platonic realm of forms.
Throughout the performance, the audience was torn between watching the musicians and the Jungian shadows. This was apparently by design, as the staging incorporated a semicircle comprising two violinists (Subaiou Carter and Nicole Wendl), a violist (Jessica Cooper), and a cellist (Alyssa Lawson), eventually adding a classical guitarist (Scott Hill) and a charanguista (Carlos Boltes), into the drama, again, due to the logistics of the stage design. Hill and Boltes provided subtle, vocal harmonies as well.
The main performance comprised the six-part Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout by Gabriela Lena Frank (2001) and El Vuelo de tu Alma (“a work in five movements”) by Javier Farías (2017). Cooper notes, “The inspiration for Luz & Leyendas comes from my experience living for several years in Chile.” It is where Cooper met her husband and unearthed an affinity for “the Andes mountains and their beauty” as well as the “Chilean culture and its love for life.” Cooper also fell in love with Andean music, which, combined with classical overtones, forms the tapestry that allows the threads of black and gray shadows to be woven into a fabric that conjures an atmosphere that, at times, evokes Alfred Hitchcock, but, more often, David Lynch.
The orchestration sounded fresh, vivid, and passionate. Employing creative bowing and mimetic plucking, the strings deftly created an atmosphere that ranged from trepidation to epiphany, simulating heartbeats and raindrops, sighs and cries. At one point, Lawson strummed her cello to evoke a deep, thunderous resonance to underscore a journey that, following the roseate image employed throughout the performance to signal transition, led into the psychedelia. As the violins shrilled to a piercing whistle, we followed the puma on a quest over a psychotropic background (reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s stage backdrop during the Syd Barrett era). Along with the condor, the puma (the “guardian of the Andes”) is a sacred animal in Chilean culture.
Once Hill and Boltes joined the quartet (about halfway into this eclectic, one-hour performance), the drama amplified, as the charango provided a combination of harmonic and dissonant textures and a percussive undertone. Boltes commanded the instrument sweeping his hands across the ten-stringed fretboard which, though it intimates a mandolin, possesses a quite distinct tonal quality with a tuning foreign to most Westerners. Barre chords (played by pressing down multiple strings across a single fret with one finger) and pristine harmonics, coupled with an aria of classical instrumentation, filled the small theater with a resonant, palatable ambiance.
There was a seventh instrument in the production, one that could only be seen in shadow: the zampoña. Resembling the feathers at the base of the condor’s tail, as well as a kalimba (whose sounds are evoked at times by the violins), this instrument served various purposes. At times we saw it as a fence, sequestering the Girl in diminutive puppet form, and at other times it became a staircase, augmented by arpeggiated classical guitar runs that propelled the protagonist to ascend and descend into an intricate balance in which she assimilates cultural tradition and a burgeoning self-realization that synthesizes, in the Hegelian sense, the gifts of her ancestors and the manifestation of her self-actualization. Eventually, the zampoña becomes the Girl’s heart, suggesting that the imagery for which it was previously used merge to form the Girl’s soul giving her wings, which, like those of the Andean condor, empower her to soar beyond the mountain range.
A triune theme bookends the entire production, symbolizing both the main character and the overarching structure. Dan Clawson’s exquisite lighting created a merger of themes. Early in the performance, the Girl morphed into a threefold image: a black central figure dancing with two shadows of herself in gray tones. The same image returned at the end. Is she blending themes that the performance deconstructs? Is she struggling with her own shadow-side (à la Jung), bequeathed by her ancestors, challenged by her creative aspirations? Is it a reflection of the entire piece, which combines three different movements: Frank’s An Andean Walkabout, Farías El Vuelo de tu Alma, and Victor Jara’s La Partida, the musical finale?
The latter is more than an appendage or an encore. This is the moment when the orchestra moves from providing a soundtrack to being the climax of the evening. La Partida is structured around a descending theme (B, A, G, F sharp, Em), moving in brisk steps, with each instrument taking the lead in turns. “It’s never the same structure each night,” Hill informed me after the show. Although the piece is not improvised, the descending scale, and particularly how long it is played by each instrument, varies each time La Partida is performed. Boltes told me that the word partida means both “to begin something” and “to cut, as in to say goodbye.”
This makes La Partida a fitting finale, but it is not a mere postlude. It encapsulates the dichotomist themes that pervade the entire piece: shadows and light, past and future, dreams and actuality, tradition and iconoclasm, landscapes and dreamscapes, predator and prey. It speaks using the language of Andean culture imbued with classical overtones. The sublime artistry of Foster’s movements, saturated with motifs of ballet and Celtic stepdance, mirrored the passion of the players who attacked their instruments with blistering fervor at times, and, in other moments, reflective subtlety to draw the audience back into a contemplative mode.
Luz & Leyendas is to be experienced whole cloth. It ends where it begins. It is a partida. It presents ideas that, although they appear distinct, conjoin in the consciousness of the main character and the audience alike. Those with an understanding of Chilean culture will relish Luz & Leyendas. (The audience included many patrons of Chilean descent.) Those who know nothing of the folktales, symbols, and music that pervade this milieu will be inspired to learn more about it. Is that not a telos of art?
Buen trabajo to director Amy Meyer; co-directors Sophia Nora Giordano and Jamie Semel; lead producer Jessica Cooper; assistant producers Alyssa Lawson, Subaiou Carter, and Amy Meyer; as well as the players, performers and puppeteers. The entirety of Luz & Leyendas is so enchanting that you will forget that it is a production. It is a delectable feast for world music aficionados.
I look forward with anticipation to other altitudinous works by Spectacle Collective.