Once underway, the piece’s aural textures oscillated between the stuff of ambient lullaby, impending doom, and pre-industrial ecosystems. Living Earth Show performing Raven Chacon’s Tremble Staves at the Sutro Baths | Credit: Roger Jones Smiley wore a patterned, hooded shawl with a cyclops visor and a wooden staff. Meyerson wore a brown, blue, and green one-piece adorned with earthy designs and robust black plumage along the chest, arms, and shoulders. Andrews wore a prismatic suit made of mirror tiles (think disco ball meets chainmail), and his face was a discomfiting void. And on the stage sat Andrews and Meyerson’s prepared guitar and electro-acoustic percussion kits. To the left was a placid, moss-lined pool. The Baths burned down in 1966, leaving skeletal structures awash in the waters they were built to control.)įor Tremble Staves, monitors and percussion rigs followed the site’s curves and tiers the audience faced the roaring ocean and a central “stage” area. (The Sutro Baths, dreamed up in the late-nineteenth century by Adolph Sutro, once housed the world’s largest indoor swimming complex. “ Tremble Staves,” writes Chacon - an award-winning Navajo composer and recent winner of the Berlin Prize - turns to “moving and stationary bodies of water” to model the “relationships that animals (people included) might have with each other, or with the land, with collisions in nature, or with something else that we can’t comprehend, even at our most spiritual and vulnerable.” By linking “narratives of the San Francisco Bay Area’s complicated relationship with water” with “overlapping Navajo creation stories,” Tremble Staves draws new attention to the crumbling structures grafted onto the shore. Drawing on the talents of Travis Andrews on guitar, Andy Meyerson on percussion, Smiley as narrator, costumer Rashad Pridgen, production manager Cath Brittan, and a large cast of supporting local artists on percussion and guitar, Tremble Staves offered attendees a challenging meditation on water, ruin, relation, and renewal. This last question, delivered by writer and performer Ashley Smiley, began and ended The Living Earth Show’s world premiere of Raven Chacon’s Tremble Staves, a site-specific, multidimensional performance built for San Francisco’s Sutro Baths. Here, by the cliffs and gulls: what are you feeling? “Do you know where you are?” Composer Raven Chacon | Credit: Roger Jones See it: the bleak fogscape, the sublime coast - the air, mud, brine, and algae slowly swallowing an edifice of charred concrete. Imagine, if you will, the sound of an electro-acoustic cello, reeled in from a saltwater pool and jolted to cranium-splitting life by two musicians in futurist regalia.