From Santa Barbara to San Diego, from Palm Springs to Santa Monica, Southern California is in the midst of a massive festival — PST ART: “Art & Science Collide,” sponsored by the Getty Foundation.
The roster of participants is as expansive as the land the festival covers. Thematically conceived exhibitions and programs are being presented by 80 major museums, educational institutions, performance venues, and galleries large and small.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic unveiled its part of PST ART at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Saturday, Nov. 16, as the centerpiece of its Noon to Midnight marathon: the concert premiere of Lightscape, created by installation artist Doug Aitken.
The event combined a film with live performances by members of the LA Phil New Music Group and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. The movie casts the choral soloists as characters, and as they sang onscreen, they were overdubbed by their live selves. The same was true of the instrumentalists. For example, when pianists Vicki Ray and Joanne Pearce Martin played Steve Reich in the film, the music was again performed live and melded with the visuals seamlessly. It was all conducted with the skill of a ringmaster by Grant Gershon.
As stated by Aitken, “Lightscape portrays the landscape of the American West in all its diversity, from the desolate reaches of Death Valley to futuristic automated robotics factories to Richard Neutra’s tranquil mid-century modern architecture.”
Think of it as Koyaanisqatsi meets Yellowstone. A lone cowpoke ambles through desolate landscapes of deserts and mountains, eventually colliding with modern technology, including a graveyard of rusting 747s outside the town of Mojave. In the end, he finally just gives up, hitches his pony to a gas station pump, and walks off into a Taylor Sheridan sunset.
Ironically, it was exactly 41 years ago that the Los Angeles International Film Exposition (Filmex) presented the West Coast premiere of Koyaanisqatsi, with the Philip Glass Ensemble performing the film’s score live the night before at The Roxy on the Sunset Strip.
There are more than a few elements in Lightscape directly inspired by director Godfrey Reggio’s landmark depiction of “life out of balance.” The characters in Aitken’s film are also struggling to find some form of emotional equilibrium as they travel the freeways of Los Angeles, which serve as a powerful visual metaphor in both films.
Conceived and directed by Aitken and shot in collaboration with cinematographer Chris Hadland, Lightscape depicts a world on the brink of self-destruction, where people, particularly in the sequences shot in a massive robotics distribution hub, resemble the numbed worker-slaves of Richard Wagner’s Nibelheim. Their only rebellion, real or imagined, is to suddenly break into dance.
“You can lose yourself in an instant” plays like a warning mantra as the film’s central characters, representing a cross section of ages and races, grapple to hold on to a world that is clearly spinning out of control.
Like a Hollywood musical, the characters speak then break into song to a score that incorporates live and recorded compositions by Aitken, Glass, Reich, John Adams, Gabriella Smith, Meredith Monk, Terry Riley, Beck, Zoë Keating, Michael Gordon, and Rodaidh McDonald.
The dancers that create an evocative alternative reality as they weave in and out of the film’s enigmatic narrative are members of LA Dance Project, described as “krumpers from L.A.’s street-dance subculture.” Beck, the folk-soul trio LA LOM, and funk legend James Gadson make cameo appearances.
In the early 1980s, Koyaanisqatsi was driven by the alarm-bell clarity of its message, its visionary imagery, and the uninterrupted momentum of Glass’s score. Fascinating and as superbly performed as it was, Lightscape never achieved that level of emotional or ecological impact, though the work challenges its audience to “reconsider our perceptions of progress as we hurtle into an unknown technological future.”
Sadly, with Donald Trump about to reenter the White House, sounding the alarm now may be too late.
