NOTES FROM THE DIRECTOR

This evening’s performance is a meditation on beauty as revealed through time and nature—through what blossoms, fades, returns, or vanishes as we try to hold onto it. It explores the way beauty can feel both enduring and fragile, lost to time or ever-present in the landscape. It brings together early music, music that feels as though it has traveled across centuries, and newly commissioned music, creating a world where past and present continually speak to one another.

This concert is one of our most expansive. With the largest cast of performers in our history and a creative process shaped deeply by collaboration, A Vanishing Point reflects the kind of art-making that matters most to me: challenging, deeply human, and alive. 

I invite you to experience these works by giving yourself over to their shifting textures, images, and sonic worlds—to notice what feels fleeting, what feels enduring, and what emerges in the space between. I also invite you to read the notes that follow for each piece, which offer further insight into the music, ideas, and collaborations that shaped this program.

Each artist has brought considerable care, rigor, imagination, and generosity to this process, and I am deeply grateful to the performers and collaborators whose work has made this evening possible. I am blessed to be surrounded by so many vibrant, kind, and dedicated artists. To them I send my deepest thanks for making this work possible.

~ Sarah

Danse Suite for Eight is a Modern dance interpretation of Baroque style and form. The choreography takes as its inspiration not only Bach’s musical structure, but also characteristics of French Baroque dance types which the suite features: Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Passepied, and Gigue.

The title of the music, English Suite, is misleading as the music is French, Italian, and German in style. (Some historians believe Bach may have written the set of 6 suites for an Englishman of rank.) Uniquely, this set of keyboard suites feature dynamic opening Preludes which do not correlate to any specific court dance. The Prelude presents both a musical motif for Bach’s entire suite and introduces the dance phrases upon which the rest of the choreography is based. The music is more fugue-like than dance-like, and the choreography reflects the contrapuntal intricacy with complex canons and spatial formations.

One of the most distinctive characteristics of the Allemande, or “German” dance, was the unusual hand holdings and arm positions, probably originating from German folk dances. The Courante, or “running” dance, is lively and light—though the French court preferred it to be solemn. The Sarabande, originally of Spanish Arab origin, was a serious and expressive dance that featured slow suspends, leaning postures, and abrupt stops. Bach often gave the Sarabande a privileged position in his suites, anchoring it as the expressive heart of the work. Here the dancer wears a mask, a theatrical practice of the Baroque to disguise effort. The Passepied, or “passing feet,” is the quickest of the dances and has a playful quality. The Gigue is tempestuous and rhythmically complex. Dancers enter in vertical lines, recalling the vertical line of the Prelude.  The second half presents the musical subject of the first half but inverted or upside down. In response, the dancers perform the opening movement but in reverse. Reflecting the common practice of the era, this work concludes with a ceremonious bow, graciously acknowledging the audience.

My Heart’s in the Highlands is a quintet that explores isolation and homesickness. There can be a helplessness at times of major transition, and this piece delves into the emotions and psychology that occur during this sense of foundational loss. The dancers, through weight bearing and shared vulnerability, embody a deep connection, which heightens the despondency and heartache at being forsaken, when all that might best represent “home” is lost. Choreographed in 2007, it is the first piece I made for the company. 

A Vanishing Point explores impermanence through dance, music, and design. Inspired by the visual art concept of a vanishing point and the Japanese philosophy of mujo—the understanding that all things are impermanent—the work reflects on the transient nature of all things; how beauty emerges, changes, and disappears even as we experience it. 

The piece uses the changing seasons as a metaphor for this condition of transience. As the natural world moves through cycles of growth, decay, and renewal, so too do our bodies, emotions, and lives. Nothing remains fixed. The dance and music together trace that continual process of becoming and vanishing, inviting the audience to notice both the fragility and the richness of what is passing. 

The dance was created collaboratively with the performers through the interpretation of written movement scores, allowing authorship to become shared rather than singular. With the singular authority of a choreographer intentionally receding, what emerges is a dance shaped by collective interpretation, in which the origin of movement becomes less fixed and more fleeting. In this work not only the dance, but also the idea of authorship, becomes mutable and vanishes.

The commissioned score for chamber choir, piano, and percussion sets four original haiku in a musical landscape that shifts between starkness and lushness, presence and absence. It invites us to embrace ephemerality not as something to resist, but as a fundamental condition of being, and to find peace with our own vanishing nature.