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Matthew Davidson  

Aliens disguised as Elvis...

 Year: 1990
theatre piece for seven performers

  • Programme Note

    The full title of this work is Aliens disguised as Elvis kidnapped my grandmother’s appendix in a previous life after having been sucked through a black hole singularity on a Sunday afternoon picnic in the park with Aunt Jemima Puddleduck while discussing the simultaneity of states of sub-atomic particles, K. 666.31. The work is also known as The Enigma of Arrival, the purpose of this piece is to portray the epic struggle of Life and Death on a microcosmic and macrocosmic scale.

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William Dart  

Away with the Fairies

Duration: 50' 00" Year: 1983
a divertissement for diva

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John Drummond  

Cinderella

Duration: 2h 00' 00" Year: 1978
music and lyrics for a pantomime

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Felicity Williams  

Four Chants from Okarito

Duration: 20' 00" Year: 1988
a street theatre work with mime, music and costume

  • Instrumentation
    For SA choir, synthesiser, flute, clarinet, percussion from choir (bongos, guiro, wood-block, log drum, xylophone, two glockenspiels, triangle, standard-drum, Acme 499 Nightingale whistle, four bamboo flutes)
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Jeff Henderson  

Innocence of Light

 Year: 1999
a theatrical work

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Chris Adams  

River Lavalle

Duration: 1h 00' 00" Year: 2011
A Chamber Opera (six singers, eight instrumentalists incl sound effects operator) presented as a 1940s style radio play detective story with an underlying environmental theme.

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Matthew Suttor  

Sarrasine

Duration: 16' 38" Year: 1999
a dramatic monologue with music on tape for live performer

  • Instrumentation
    music on tape, for a live performer and optional interactive control of sound files, and projected imagery mixed in realtime. Equipment required for performance includes two Macintosh G3 computers, a Silicon Graphics workstation, MIDI interfaces, a video camera and a video projector.
  • Programme Note

    Sarrasine takes a pragmatic approach to so-called real-time interactive music technology. The environments I am using to perform this work, BigEye (video to MIDI) and Image/ine (real-time control of video processing), were developed at the Studios for Electronic Instrumental Music (STEIM) in Amsterdam.

    These programs produce no sound themselves but offer a myriad of control possibilities and in doing so ask the question: what is a musical instrument? A computer keyboard, a mouse, a video camera?

    Matthew Suttor’s multimedia theater piece, “Sarrasine”, is comprised of eight sections, and is based on Balzac’s “Sarrasine”. Balzac’s work takes place in the 1830’s at a party in Paris as two lovers discuss the tale of Sarrasine, a frightful old man, believed to be over 100 years old, who is seated in a corner. Though the narrative of Balzac’s “Sarrasine” is difficult to discern from a first listening, the major themes of Suttor’s work are conveyed through a pleasantly overwhelming barrage of sound and video, enhanced and enriched by the live performance of Suttor. This collage of richly variegated of sounds and images, collected from across centuries, challenges the audience to weigh the world of Balzac’s latent tale with Suttor’s “Sarrasine”.

    In the beginning of “Sarrasine”, the text projected onto a large video screen directly behind Suttor invites the audience to, “Imagine you are sitting in an opera house. Somewhere in France. Nowhere fancy. Provincial even. In 1999.” And later, Balzac’s texts recounts, “Sarrasine left for Italy in 1758.” Henceforth the audience is invited to dispel the notion of chronological time and geographical place, and imagine a landscape which fuses past and present worlds as the work draws upon references across centuries.

    The sonic world of the opera is a blend of the recorded speech of the Suttor’s voice reading from Balzac’s text, recorded and processed mbira, harpsichord, flutes, and other electro-acoustic samples. Despite their possibly disparate features and implications, Suttor combines these sounds, and successfully forges a unique sonic world which at once suggests the Eighteenth century of Balzac’s piece as well as our own time.

    Though Suttor remained mute throughout the performance, allowing the recorded music and text to speak for him, his reserved, yet precise, performance maintained a delicate balance such that he could step in and out of the pre-recorded video world. The video often contained images of paintings from the earlier time periods, including one recurring image of Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.” Suttor at one point assumed the pose of Venus, and their striking resemblance was as provocative as amusing. At another moment, Suttor stood such that a portion of the video was projected onto his body as well as onto the screen. In the most complete union of the video and live performance, the screen contained live video footage of Suttor writing and drawing as prerecorded video images were superimposed on the screen.

    As the audience watched Suttor literally step in and out of the video, and listened to his pre-recorded music and voice tell the story of Sarrasine, the audience was compelled to draw parallels and conclusions regarding the juxtaposition of the two distinct yet delightfully mergeable worlds of Balzac’s and Suttor’s Sarrasine.

    Report written by David Birchfield, Producer of the Movement and Sound Concerts

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Helen Bowater  

The Chafing of the Stump

Duration: 25' 00" Year: 1987
for tape, soprano saxophone, cello (tempered electronically) and solo dancer

  • Programme Note

    In the original performance of this work, props included carcasses, raw meat, offal strung up on stand and Japanese anti-slaughter poetry on sheets around walls. The tape was realised by David Bowater.

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Anthony Ritchie  

The God Boy

Duration: 1h 30' 00" Year: 2004
An opera in two acts based on the novel 'The God Boy' by Ian Cross

Score Sample
Video Sample
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Michael Norris  

TIMEDANCE

Duration: 38' 00" Year: 2012
Live score for dance-film, in collaboration with choreographer/filmmaker Daniel Belton.

Score Sample
  • Instrumentation
    two violins, cello and piano
  • Programme Note

    Time is cut open. Time is dismantled. It is this gateway that we open and close to really observe movement, and to glimpse Spirit. In this work it is the reunion of separated or broken parts that finds fluidity and wholeness. The compass of the dance is given full articulation in this state – we can appreciate the elegance and the mastery of the human form in space.

    Time Dance is in one sense a study of the dancer in action. Sinews of time – this is the algebra. It is not only examining but also restoring – reuniting from fragments of time – these pieces of time are coalescing to make the dance. When the figure pauses, the cascading echoes created through dance catch up with it. These are the monuments. When we catch up with ourselves we create a harmonic in space time. It is another way of celebrating being human. In the work we observe the relationship and sense of belonging to our home planet, Earth. This is geological, and thalassic – like a great cloak of emotion, the geometric grids and moving point maps are energetic prints containing our stories, our journeys, our pain, fear, beauty, love and joys. They are rippling beyond time, across time with the emotional frequencies that make up what it is to be human. This is also a dance. Time will quiver. I want to magnify silence and distort stillness. The geometry is a field of consciousness. Ultimately our physical bodies are the products of wave actions. The shadow is going into a wave space – and that alters the way we see everything.

    Source: http://www.michaelnorris.info

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