Symmetrical Lives

In Symmetrical Lives, music is seen as well as heard. The two performers are world-class musicians who dance while they play, bringing a new perspective to music that is almost 300 years old.

Flutist Zara Lawler, violinist Maja Cerar and choreographer C. Neil Parsons created Symmetrical Lives as a site-specific modern take on J. S. Bach’s beautiful Orchestral Suite in B Minor. The choreography explores both musical and physical ideas of balance and imbalance, equality and inequality, symmetry and asymmetry, isolation and togetherness, what is hidden and what is revealed. Bach’s exquisite music is presented in a new arrangement by Lawler and Cerar that favors these choreographic choices, where intricate entwining of the musical voices can be reflected in the intimate entwining of the dancer’s bodies.

At once thoughtful and playful, timely and timeless, Symmetrical Lives reflects the arc of the COVID-19 pandemic, while inclining toward physical and artistic liberation. The first movement was shot in two separate apartment spaces, referencing the isolation of Zoom meetings, the second in a New York City park with both performers in the same space but never quite meeting. The following movements progress through locations that become more rural and open, even as the dancer-musicians come physically and musically closer to each other. The final movement accelerates the action to a surprising conclusion.