No matter how many shows you see, stagecraft can always surprise, even through the simplest riffs on established norms.

Case in point: during one sequence in Phelim McDermott’s Tao of Glass, individual members of the orchestra move around the stage, circling the action as they continue to play their instruments.

I’ve written too many times that theater, as an artistic medium, is fundamentally defined by the movement of bodies in space. To double down on this pedanticism (as pedantic a word as there ever was), you could specify this sentiment by saying that theater’s means of expression is the relational movement of relational bodies in relational space.

And because music is one such means of expression, altering the placement of the music in relation to the rest of the stage’s meaning has the capacity to deepen all of that meaning in layered conversation.