Seattle Symphony

During the pandemic, Han Lash composed six songs inspired by J.S. Bach’s inventions for a series called Notes from Exile — wistful, poignant and disarmingly direct. Now they introduce six new pieces to add to them, to create a set of 12 pieces: The Art of Leaving. "The Art of Leaving is part lecture, part theatre, part dance. The work's fulcrum point, as it were, is a talk about the role that our concept of gender plays in both our inner and outer lives. These observations about how gender is performed through a number of social filters informs the choreography that is interspersed along with recorded text that plays with the idea of the fluidity and mutability of our perception. At times playful and lighthearted and at others seriously presented as a carefully researched and constructed lecture, the piece is intended to invite the audience on an imaginative journey, never to alienate or present a polemical point of view. Instead the audience is invited to look at something we often imagine as a solid, biologically determined truth as a thing that is socially perceived, and is therefore dynamic, in flux, like our very existence." –Han Lash