Roar Shack Live!: Lyra

Welcome to the third performance of The Living Earth Show’s San Francisco concert series: Roar Shack Live!

Market Street Arts and The Living Earth Show have built an innovative partnership to turn a vacant bar into an experimental music hub. The 2024-25 series, Roar Shack Live!, will breathe new life into 34-7th Street, the former home of renowned cocktail lounge Mr. Smith's, turning it into a dynamic venue for experimental chamber music and multidisciplinary performances.

The second concert in the series, Lyra, takes place on Thursday, November 14, 2024. This 65-minute production, with its myriad refrains and constellation-like form, owes its debts to L’Orfeo, Claudio Monteverdi’s 1607 operatic setting of the myth. However, the artists’ decision to capture the ballet in the arid landscapes of Eastern California excites a new exploration of how the themes of love, loss, trust, and fallibility provide insight into more urgent issues concerning technology and the natural world.

The Music

Lyra brings to life hybrid digital-acoustic atmospheres that surround the musicians, revealing a composer who is invested in exploring the dramatic potential of technology in ways that highlight, rather than diminish, the resonant beauty of acoustic instruments. Samuel Adams’s score imagines percussionist Andy Meyerson and guitarist Travis Andrews as one single virtuosic hyperinstrument—a 21st century lyre—whose plucked and hammered sounds are mirrored with layers of computer-generated just-intoned resonance. The result is music that straddles the fragile and often imperceptible line between earthly and digital realms.

The Movement

Vanessa Thiessen's choreography for Lyra evolved from a literary and thematic character exploration from the canon of Orpheus-inspired texts to phrase-based movement generation in which the artists of Post:ballet under the direction of Robin Dekkersdeveloped a physical language unique to the qualities of each character. This collaborative development process, along with the extension of classical technique into contemporary movement and the transfer of performance from the stage to the outdoors, offers a new perspective of what’s possible in contemporary dance. 

The Film

Having worked primarily with street dancers in outdoor settings over the course of his career with YAK Films, cinematographer Benjamin Tarquin has accumulated a wealth of experience creating dynamic and mesmerizing dance films using only natural light. With Lyra, this knowledge is put on display in the luminous landscapes of the Sierra Nevada foothills and along the corridor between Bishop and Alabama Hills in Inyo County, where the film was shot in the summer of 2021. 

To create accessible creative hubs in Mid-Market, all performances will be pay-what-you-can, ranging from $1–$100.

Please read the FAQ below for information about tickets and seating.

Host or Publisher The Living Earth Show