A-Ronné 

Image: frames from S8mm film to video projection; live performance

A-Ronné
Luciano Berio (1974) ‘Theatre of the Mind’
Polystylistic / polylinguistic audio, here presented as live performance with film

Direction, film design (Super 8mm, BW and Colour, video, stage direction) Hopkins

Choreography with Kate Brown
Filming in collaboration with Pippa Nissen and Charles Edwardes (lighting)

Costume Tania Spooner
Performers (singing and film)
Sam Kenyon
Matthew Sharp

Site-specific staging of Berio’s work for five voices about a cycle of life.
Presented at the former Gainsborough Film Studios, on the eve of the building’s redevelopment. Film element made at the same location.

Berio’s piece and this show
A and Ronné were the first and last letters in an old version of the Italian alphabet.  The beginning and the end. Alpha to Omega. Life to Death.
A-Ronné vocalises texts about death – ‘In my beginning is my end’.
This production links this collage of poly-stylistic voicings to the life cycle of the performance location, the abandoned buildings of Islington Studios, which once housed Gainsborough Pictures. Many significant C20 British film-makers worked there, including Hitchcock.

Berio’s use of text fragments creates journeys between integration and disintegration – between sound and sense – and vice versa.
As an audio-only piece, Berio intended listeners to construct a drama in their imaginations which might give rise to these sounds.
In our piece, we visualised a parallel. A film shows a ghostly audience, played by the same singers performing the music live.  They seem to be sharing our location, stirred by seeing, and sometimes participating, in a film.

Almeida Opera at the Gainsborough Studios
Link to article about the location on Friendsoffilm

Created in 2000