death among the apple trees
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Programme notes
I shall call this stricture, this rigidity, "death among the apple trees" for ever.
This is a single picture from the kaleidoscopic score for a dance-theatre piece called The Saturated Moment, based on the first chapter of Virginia Woolf's play-poem The Waves. Even this picture contains two images: miniature portraits of the characters Neville and Rhoda. Trapped - one in certainty, one in incomprehension - they exist in different spaces; but fear and darkness breach safety barriers, and certainty dissolves and drowns.
Alternative Programme note:
This is a scene from a 15-minute dance-theatre piece. It portrays two of the six characters in the piece. One is a control freak and the other is a dreamer. They shouldn't really be able to interact but they do. Oh, yes, and there are knives.
Acknowledgements
The original theatre work was choreographed by Nigel Stewart, danced by Dominique Bulgin, presented by Sap Dance, and initially created through the Artists' Programme of Chisenhale Dance. Grateful thanks to Nigel and Dominique for the opportunity to work with them, and to Steve Benner, who made several of the best gestures.
Performances
- CBSO Centre, Birmingham, England, as part of 25 years of BEAST, 8 March 2008
- Australasian Computer Music Conference, ACMC 2008, in Sydney, Australia, 11 July 2008
- "A Diamond in the Mud" as part of Digital Arts Week at the Literaturhaus in Basel, Switzerland, 25-27 September 2008
- Sonic Art Oxford Jukebox installation at Sonic Art Oxford, Oxford, 2-3 April 2009
- Slackspace, Colchester, England, as part of New Music in Quad, 5 February 2011
- Seventh International Conference on Music since 1900 (LancMAC) listening room, Lancaster University, England, 29-30 July 2011