(Image: FBC Stravinsky documentary, 1965)
Proposal
Vagabondage – Tim Hopkins and Lena Langer, composer
4 love stories, threading across time and space, passing briefly through an episode in the life of Stravinsky, a figure featuring in the dreams of four couples from different eras, as they travel towards each other.
A new lyric theatre piece for medium scale venues, 1h30 – 2h, with multi-media devices and live performance traditions.
Performers: 2 classical dancers, 4 folk performers, (offering folk percussion and other instruments, song and dance), 2 classical operatic sopranos (one with deeper voice, another with lighter), an ensemble with a conductor:
Clarinet in B (Dbl. Bass Clarinet, E-flat clarinet)
Trumpet (Dbl. Cornet, Trumpet Piccolo)
Percussion – 1 player
Violin
Viola
Cello I
Cello II
Double Bass
Some adventures take place now, in an anxious world of hyper-portable information, visual culture, remote internet relationships and the shadow of environmental catastrophe. Some occur in a version of the past, in lost worlds of tangible presence, sound and contact. Others exist in a version of the near future.
Different technologies make their journeys possible, implying different historic contexts and adorning the way stories are told, (e.g. shadow play, cine-film, iron age metal work, steam mechanics, electro-mechanics, electronics, digital audio visuality and networking.) But the experience of migration is ambivalent. The excitement of new horizons is shadowed by the anxieties of dislocation.
A key visual hub is a 3-minute documentary clip, made in 1965, showing Stravinsky lying on a small bed, surrounded by labelled luggage, travelling between Europe and America. In this state of artistic vagabondage he talks about his life and times. He is elderly, frail, an ark of memories. The four couples pass through a replica of this space as part of their rites of passage, talking to Stravinsky for a time, or becoming him without necessarily knowing it, occupying his state of mind, playing his role, before moving off, en route to their own fate.
Music
Original music by Langer will define the sound world and frame the musical dramaturgy of the event, (extending her existing artistic interest in relating her contemporary voice to ethnic material, examples on CD.) The Pokrovsky Ensemble will complement this with wider reference to material from their folk repertoire.
Vagabondage emerges from a 35 minute workshop event “Give me your blessing, for I go to a foreign land” devised by Tim Hopkins and composer Lena Langer, presented 13 February 09 in the Clore Studio by Opera Genesis. They are words are spoken by a girl to her father on the eve of her marriage as depicted in Stravinsky’s Les Noces. Our project began as a meditation on this work, but evolved into a reflection on processes of migration that Les Noces took as its subject and exemplified in its process: the emotional migration of the bride, and the cultural migration of folk materials into a modern art object.
Our artistic concern was the fate of authenticity in moments of accelerating technological change.
Link to Give Me Your Blessing workshop
Recent Comments