Review: YESTERDAY TOMORROW at McGuire Theatre

"Yesterday Tomorrow is a kind of musical, a collaboration between human artists and evolutionary algorithms. In this work, a trio of live singers are fed a real-time algorithmically-generated score to create an environmental concert of song, software, gesture, light, and space. Inspired by a kind of artificial intelligence known as evolutionary computation, Yesterday Tomorrow gives a unique experience of the complexity and unpredictability of the present tense contrasted with the known past and the imagined future.

Beginning with the Beatles' "Yesterday," algorithms slowly transform that song into "Tomorrow" from the musical Annie. Three singers receive the computer-generated music and lyrics both aurally and visually, and follow a movement score, also produced algorithmically, that moves them from a starting to an ending position. Each night, the spatial and musical path from the past to the future is different; neither the singers, the creative team, nor the audience knows where we will end up.

The singers onstage and the computer generated melodies and lyrics blend to create a disorienting series of alternations: between human and machine, between sound and sense, between the recognizable and the utterly unfamiliar. Finally and eventually, it's a piece about the passage of time, about progress and regress, about the loss of one world and the optimistic creation of another."

I enjoyed this production, having studied music, I found the music projections on the screens along with the three sofas, lamp, tv, and laptop to be a modern simple setting. The production started off with Yesterday, by the Beatles and ended with Tomorrow from the musical Annie and in between it was what seemed to be a transition from one to another, hence yesterday, tomorrow. There were three talented singers who were reading music off the projected screens singing their own part with subtle synchronized movements every so often. The audience was engaged with this production. The singers could all read music well but I was impressed that the singers were able to read the music off the projector screens as sometimes the melodic parts in the measures were very quick, plus sustaining their singing voices for the full 60 minutes. I was following along and I did not notice any missing a note.

I would recommend seeing this production at the McGuire Theatre inside the Walker Art Center.

For more ticket and show information, click the link below

Photos by Maria Baranova

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