[THE] (consisting of Edwin Harkins and Philip Larson, two classically trained musicians and professors at the University of California, San Diego) is a performer/composer duo which specializes in unprecedented types of juxtapositions of movement, visuals, and sound.
[THE]'s belief that verbal story-lines, conscious abstract structures, and stylistic modeling, as approaches to composition, are usually trivializations of art, has received much reinforcement, not only from the acclaim of such major figures as John Cage and Toru Takemitsu, but primarily from the unusually positive responses (sometimes humorous, sometimes sorrowful but always enigmatic) from audiences in Tokyo, Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Toronto, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles during the past ten years.
Harkins and Larson offer a stimulating presentation of their personal compositional process -- where we see movement as a primary musical element, a benign attitude towards materials, a careful regard for motivations and expectancies and a respect for audience investment -- a process that begins with answers and leads to explorations, via paradox, of meaning, illusion, parody, complexity. Audiences leave with gifts of ideas on creativity and experimentation to ponder.
- The Vancouver Sun
"[THE] presents something new - plays which can only be accomplished by well-trained musicians. I was very attracted to their broad perspectives and their world of well controlled intelligence and nonsenses."
- Literary Magazine The Umi, (Mitsuo Aki) Tokyo, Japan
"....like Cheech and Chong portraying Dr. Strangelove"
- LA Herald Examiner
"The most genuinely hilarious and skilled piece of musical theater I have seen"
- Musical America Magazine
"[THE] has left a trail of punctured behavioral conventions wherever it has played.... surreal, intangible, absurd, enchanting groove... unbridled intellectual chaos... Their art is subtle but devastating, indescribably wonderful
" - California Magazine
"The West Coast duo [THE] was sheer manic delight"
- Chicago Tribune
"[THE] asserted the power of the artist over the raw materials of existence. Harkins and Larson are virtuosos of the non-sequitur. Come to think of it, they are virtuosos in the usual sense as well"
- Toronto Star
"[THE] is really wonderful. They jump over a fence of arts with their rare humor and crystal sorrow. This is what we call - a poem"
- Toru Takemitsu