theatre, dance, video-opera
theatre
Vanessa and Virginia
This beautiful and intense play is based on the novel by Susan Sellers. It’s currently touring the UK in a production by Moving Stories, following performances in Aix en Provence (September 2010) and Krakow (November 2010). For further details see vanessa and virginia; see also the performances at the Byre Theatre in St Andrews on 11 and 12 February 2011.
dance
Properties of Light
Commissioned by Cam-bridge Contemporary Dance for their spectacular Light Matters celebration in December 2009, this dance piece was created with choreographer Isobel Cohen, and takes a quirky view of Newton’s ‘Opticks’. For 6 dancers and 7 players; duration 11 minutes.
As promised, you can now see and hear this online: click here -
Properties of Light – video Programme notes will be posted soon, too. For more info, see the Light matter post (and from there, the youtube video).
That Second Realm
Dance-piece for seven dancers and six musicians, based on the Purgatorio from Dante’s Divine Comedy: a collaboration with choreographer Susie Crow. Performed in Cambridge April and June 2009, and Oxford December 2010. Duration: 16 minutes.
Programme notes and video material of this piece will be posted in the coming months.
video-opera
A Sudden Cartography of Song is a theatre piece for four solo singers, narrator, live electronics and video.
It lasts about half an hour, and it’s hard to know exactly what to call it, although it occured to me recently (after the premiere) that Steve Reich has hit on quite a good name in calling his multi-media evenings ‘video-operas’. When I was working on this with Alistair Appleton, who wrote the words and created the video, we agreed at an early stage that however unexpected the themes and the narrative of the piece, and however complex the layering of the different strands (music, words, images) we wanted the whole thing to make its effect on its own terms, and not require anyone to read a programme note beforehand (or, worse, during the performance…) So that’s all we want to say! See video-opera for two posts about the first performance in Wilton’s Music Hall.
- And for a more recent performance by Carmen Elektra in a reclaimed warehouse, see two further posts lips and maps and Friday night in the warehouse. We now have a great audio recording of this performance, and Alistair is currently putting it to video – watch this space!
