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Douglas Lilburn  

Dance Sequence for Expo '70

Duration: 11' 00" Year: 1970
for tape (sounds of NZ birdsong)

David Farquhar  

Fives

Duration: 13' 00" Year: 1971
for 5 dancers and 5 instruments

Jack Body  

Love Sonnets of Michelangelo

Duration: 13' 00" Year: 1982
for soprano, mezzo-soprano, voice, and a dancer

  • Programme Note

    The Love Sonnets of Michelangelo I wrote for Michael Parmenter, with whom I worked on a programme entitled Between Two Fires (also included was a dance-theatre work I created collaboratively with Michael, using his voice as well as his body, with imagery extracted from the diaries of Franz Kafka.) At the time I was focused on different styles of melody, having just completed my Five Melodies for Piano. Inspired by the lovely voices of some of the then current students in our School of Music, I felt that women’s voices gave the expressive quality I wanted, as well as providing a useful ‘cover’ for the overtly homo-erotic tenor of the texts. The original production used film, shot by my good friend Bayley Watson, showed the dancer’s prostrate figure, swathed in bandages. As the performance unfolded the cloth was gradually cut and pealed back by hands belonging to an old man whose face we never saw, the intended metaphor being of the sculptor cutting away marble to reveal the male form that he sensed already existed within the stone.

    The work has since had other performances that have discarded the theatrical elements, most successfully when each setting is prefaced by a reading of the poem in translation.

    These settings of some of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s most personal sonnets articulate the anguish of love and desire, as well as the despair of old age. The musical style combines the theatricality of Italian bel canto with the direct expressivity of folksong.

  • Availability

Gareth Farr  

Rona e te marama

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 2007
for Balinese and Javanese Gamelan combined

  • Programme Note

    Rona e te Marama was written for a collaboration between dancer Didik Nini Thowok, and Gamelans Taniwha Jaya and Padhang Moncar. In the traditional Maori Story, Rona goes out one night to fetch water. As she walks through the bush the moon disappears behind a cloud in the darkness Rona trips over a tree root. She curses the moon for making her fall. In retaliation the moon tries to pull Rona up into the sky. Rona grabs hold of a small shrub but the moon is too strong for her. Ever since, the story goes, if you look at the full moon you can see Rona there, still clutching the shrub.

    The unusual combination of Balinese and Javanese gamelan in this piece contrasts the different tuning systems which are generally thought to be incompatible.

    Gareth Farr

  • Availability

Anthony Ritchie  

Shoal Dance

Duration: 11' 00" Year: 1997
for two violins

Stephan Schulz  

Transmigration - Reincarnation of a Nightmare

Duration: 14' 00" Year: 1989
a dance work using sextet and actors

Stephan Schulz  

Transmigration - Reincarnation of a Nightmare

Duration: 14' 00" Year: 1990
for orchestra