San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
A marriage of music and dance
Performance presented by Art of Elan explores feelings that come with taking care of those we love
Have you cared for a loved one? Have you been cared for by a loved one? If so, you know complicated feelings can often emerge from those experiences.
“With Care” is an impassioned exploration of those themes featuring two violinists and two dancers. The dancers, Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Meir Schraiber, are both former stars of Israel’s acclaimed Batsheva Dance Company. The married couple share the stage with violinists Miranda Cuckson and Keir Gogwilt, a University of California San Diego alum.
The program, created by Smith with Gogwilt, is centered on dynamics created when illness shuts a person down and another is tending to them.
“When caring for someone in that situation, emotions can quickly turn from empathy to anger,” Gogwilt said. “When we were making it, there were different kinds of violence being done globally. It seems very pertinent now.
“But we focus on domestic matters — how it registers in relationships, in the family. It’s a microcosm of violence on a more global scale.”
Art of Elan will present “With Care” on Wednesday at San Diego Repertory’s Lyceum Stage Theater. The work is an endeavor of AMOC — short for American Modern Opera Company, an interdisciplinary collective whose artists are spread across the country.
Gogwilt noted that Cuckson and Schraiber also contributed to the development of “With Care.”
“Everybody was a creator in the piece, including Miranda and Or,” Gogwilt said from his New York City home. “One of the ways we’ve thought about it is like it’s four characters with different relationships. I couldn’t say which character is which. Dynamics between us appear and dissolve onstage.”
The four performers in “With Care” are in the core ensemble of AMOC, which was co-founded in 2017 by choreographer-dancer-director Zack Winokur and composer-conductor-pianist Matthew Aucoin, a 2018 Macarthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient. In its first three years, the company presented a critically praised event on the East Coast called the Run AMOC! Festival.
The fabric of AMOC
Gogwilt has been active in AMOC since its beginning. He has found that people sometimes assume the nonprofit produces chamber operas written by its two directors.
“That’s not at all how the company works,” the Scottish-born, New York Cityraised violinist said. “It shape-shifts around what people bring to the company, which works to produce all our projects. It’s slated more towards a production model in which all our work informs each other.
“Collaborating with individuals in different disciplines and creating those relationships is really the fabric of the company and is its DNA.”
AMOC co-founder Aucoin, who wrote music for a section of “With Care,” is familiar to discerning San Diego music lovers. In January 2019, he curated the San Diego Symphony’s “Hearing the Future” Festival.
“That was such a rewarding experience, to work in venues all across the city,” Aucoin said via email.
Gogwilt also has fond memories of San Diego, having started his graduate studies at the University of California San Diego in 2015. He officially received his doctorate last fall. The school’s music department is known for its nontraditional approach.
“I’m excited to come back and reconnect with a lot of people,” Gogwilt said.
“The community at UCSD and the artists I met there informed my work in a huge way. It has a strong community feel.
“There are truly unique people in San Diego who have quietly honed their very personal craft for a long time. Speaking of care, people there care about art and care about the people they work with.”
That includes the musicians at Art of Elan who Gogwilt met when he first arrived in San Diego. He played violin with the Art of Elan ensemble and interacted frequently with its co-founder, Kate Hatmaker. He attended UC San Diego at the same time as percussionist Fiona Digney, who is now Art of Elan’s managing director and artistic producer.
The connections continue as Digney is also producer and artistic administrator at the prestigious Ojai Music Festival. AMOC has been chosen the music director of the festival’s 2022 edition in June.
This is the first time that a collective has served as music director in the festival’s 75-year history.
“Everybody in AMOC is involved in Ojai,” Gogwilt said. “We’ve been planning intensely, with a lot of workshops and rehearsals. It’s a huge undertaking and an incredible opportunity for us, for sure.”
Amid all that, he is looking forward to being on tour performing “With Care” again.
Aucoin, who considers Gogwilt and dancer Smith close collaborators, is familiar with the piece. He won’t be in San Diego but will see it again in New York.
Aucoin said it has been “liberating” for him to write music for such dance-oriented AMOC works as “With Care.”
“At its core, ‘With Care’ is an exploration of different modes of care,” the composer said. “We see the intense love of a romantic relationship, but we also witness the more poignant, delicate forms of care that come later in life, when one person’s sense of the world begins to disintegrate or grow blurry. ‘Care’ in this piece is, I think, synonymous with love.”