re_creation

Sun 28 Jan 2024, 4.30pm

CBSO Centre, Birmingham

Ticket price: General £15, Student £7.50

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re_creation is a collaborative, cross-genre production led by BCMG and visionary multi-disciplinary artist, Haroon Mirza. This ground-breaking project involves visual art, music, choreography, perfumery and costume design, what else could you want?

During this event you will be invited to move around the space and experience every corner of the performance, the sounds, shapes, and smells.

Sculpture becomes set, instrument, and lighting design. Dancer merges with instrumentalist and so on. The work is developed collectively by artists working rhizomatically without a director or conductor.

Discover a new dimension of what a concert hall performance can be and experience new commissions by composer Lucy Armstrong, Artist Haroon, and Soprano Juliet Fraser.

 

The Vision

As an attempt to untether K. F. E. Trahndorff’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk from the tropes and conventions of opera, this “adisciplinary” project aims to dilute the distinctions between a myriad of artistic forms.

Sculpture becomes set, instrument, and lighting design. Dancer merges with instrumentalist and so on. The work is developed collectively by artists following their own path, working rhizomatically without a director or Conductor.

Evolving from a narrative based on the reincarnation of a murdered healer, this psychedelic piece delves into shamanic death and rebirth from a neurochemical and theological perspective.

Haroon Mizra 2023

 

Want to get involved?

Our wonderful supporters mean we can commission more projects like re_creation. We say thank you by naming them in the score, inviting them to rehearsals, and the world première where they can meet the composer. For more info and how you can support this project, visit www.bcmg.org.uk/soundinvestment.

  

Haroon Mirza

The Dream Machine (2023) LED and video

Lucy Armstrong and Haroon Mirza   

new work (2023) world première, commissioned by BCMG’s Sound Investment Scheme, for voice, sounding sculptures and instruments

Haroon Mirza and Juliet Fraser

new work for voice, sculptures, media

Haroon Mirza's commission is generously supported by Henry Moore Foundation: https://henry-moore.org

Lucy Armstrong

An early Sondheim obsession shaped Lucy’s approach to composition and storytelling. Her work is eclectic and theatrical and juxtaposes contrasting musical ideas and grooves to create visceral, gestural sound worlds.

Lucy is drawn to telling stories through song. This has led to a variety of commissions for stage and a residency at Glyndebourne. In 2022, Lucy was one of five composers who collaboratively scored Gods of the Game, produced by Grange Park Opera and Factory Films, broadcasted on Sky Arts.

In 2021-2022, Lucy was commissioned to write for choir and orchestra for Salford Choral Society and Piccadilly Symphony Orchestra. This led to a commission from the Cambridge Philharmonic and Chorus premièred in March 2023. Lucy has been commissioned by Psappha Ensemble, FontanaMIX, The London Sinfonietta, The Arch Sinfonia, RNCM Engage, the Borealis Saxophone Quartet and the Royal Philharmonic Society.

  

Juliet Fraser

Soprano Juliet Fraser specialises in the gnarly edges of contemporary classical music. Internationally recognised as a committed interpreter of new music, Juliet regularly appears as a guest soloist with ensembles such as Musikfabrik, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, Remix, Talea and Quatuor Bozzini, and as a duo with pianist Mark Knoop. She is a core member of EXAUDI vocal ensemble, which she co-founded with composer/conductor James Weeks in 2002.

Juliet is an active commissioner of new repertoire and has worked closely with composers Laurence Crane, Pascale Criton, Bernhard Lang, Cassandra Miller and Rebecca Saunders. She is recognised for breathing new life into existing works such as Milton Babbitt’s Philomel, Morton Feldman’s Three Voices and Gérard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil. Her discography reflects the full breadth of her repertoire, with acclaimed recordings of early music and several solo albums of contemporary repertoire released on NEOS, Kairos, HCR, Hat Hut and Another Timbre. Juliet is the founder and artistic director of the eavesdropping festival in London and co-director of all that dust, a little independent label for new music. She was recently awarded an honorary Doctorate of Music by the University of Southampton.

  

Haroon Mirza

Haroon Mirza was born in 1977 in London, where he lives and works. He has a BA in painting from Winchester School of Art, and MAs in critical practice and theory from Goldsmiths College, London, and in fine art from Chelsea College of Art and Design.

Mirza has won international acclaim for installations that test the interplay and friction between sound and light waves and electric current. He devises sculptures, performances and immersive installations, such as The National Apavillion of Then and Now (2011) – an anechoic chamber with a circle of light that grows brighter in response to increasing drone, and completely dark when there is silence, or the Dyson Sphere (2022) – an earthbound version of a hypothetical, off-world megastructure in which a sun-like central tungsten light powers a carapace of photovoltaic panels. Processes are left exposed, and sounds occupy space in an unruly way, testing codes of conduct and charging the atmosphere. Mirza asks us to reconsider the perceptual distinctions between noise, sound, and music, and draws into question the categorisation of cultural forms.

Jules Cunningham

Jules (they/them) is from Liverpool and has worked professionally as a dancer for twenty years, recognised for Outstanding Modern Performance by the Critics Circle National Dance Awards, 2014. After training at the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance in London, they worked with Ballett der Stadt Theater Koblenz in Germany, Merce Cunningham Dance Company in New York, and Michael Clark Company in London, and in projects with Boris Chartmatz, Thick & Tight, Anne Carson, and Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz across Europe. Jules was in residence for Haroon Mirza’s exhibition at ACCA as part of Melbourne International Festival in 2019.

Jules has presented work in the UK and internationally, alongside engaging in choreographic research and extensive teaching. They were one of 10 commissioned artists for Art Night 2019 in London and a recipient of the 2021 Founders Prize Award at the Bethlem Gallery for their visual artwork which is currently exhibited at the Long Gallery, Maudsley Hospital.

Jules made their main stage debut at Sadler’s Wells as a New Wave Associate in 2018 with m/y, commissioned as part of the theatres 20^th anniversary celebration.

  

David Spittle

David Spittle is a poet, filmmaker, and essayist. Following his pamphlet, B O X (HVTN, 2018) Spittle published two poetry collections, All Particles and Waves (Black Herald Press, 2020) and Rubbles (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). He has written the libretti to three operas and a song-cycle commissioned by Bergen National Opera.

Spittle runs an ongoing project, Light Glyphs, that explore connections between experimental film and poetry, a series of interviews from the project has been published under the same name with Broken Sleep Books (2021): including interviews with John Ashbery, Guy Maddin, Andrew Kötting, So Mayer, Iain Sinclair, and many others. Spittle's films have screened in festivals and been broadcast on the BBC; alongside filmmaking his essays have appeared in Sight & Sound and as part of select Blu-ray releases.

He continues independent research across film and philosophy.

  

Helga Dorothea Fannon

Helga Fannon is an Icelandic-British moving image artist. She makes films that draw from her own disparate family histories, creating tender and often beguiling links between these and other narratives, both found and imagined.

Working from an expanding collection of voice, performance and text material, her current film practice explores questions of performativity through playful stagecraft combined with visual illusions whilst exploring memory as a creative act of personal reinvention. Helga is currently completing her Masters in Moving Image at The Royal College of Art.

  

Timothy Han

Timothy Han is a London-based Canadian founder of perfume house Timothy Han / Edition. Educated at l'Ecole Supérieure des Arts et techniques de la Mode in Paris and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, Han was formerly an assistant to John Galliano.

As an olfactory storyteller, exploring the inter-sensory relationship between sound and smell. Han takes inspiration from a multitude of sources, such as literature, he is adept at never limiting himself to widely perceived ‘norms’ of practice. Most recently, Han has been combining fragrance with music and VR, to create an entirely new sensory experience.

  

Osman Yousefzada

Osman Yousefzada is a British-born interdisciplinary artist and writer.

Osman’s practice revolves around modes of storytelling, merging autobiography with fiction and ritual.

His work is concerned with the representation and rupture of the migrational experience and makes reference to socio-political issues of today.

These themes are explored through moving image, installations, text works, sculpture, garment making and performance.

  

Siobhan Coen

Siobhan Coen reworks component parts of digital communication to examine visual perception and unconscious control. Inspired in-part by Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine device and his cut-up writing technique she creates new narratives that explore the interplay and tension between form and content. In doing so Coen reveals truths that are often hiding in plain sight.

Siobhan Coen (b. 1967 Orpington, UK. Lives and works in London) studied BA Fine Art, Slade School of Fine Art 2013-2017. Selected group exhibitions include: ARTAGON III, Paris, 2017; Celeste Prize, finalists’ exhibition, OXO Tower, London, 2016; Members' Show, OUTPOST, Norwich, selected by Lynda Morris & Chris Rawcliffe, 2016; Open Film 2016, OUTPOST, Norwich, and also presented at a.m London, selected by Ed Atkins, 2016.

Awards include: UCL Arts & Humanities Dean’s List, 2017; The Stanbury Prize, 2017; The Herbert Seaborn Memorial Scholarship, The Slade Prize, 2014.

 

Image: The Ancients call it Ataraxia by Haroon Mirza and Helga Dóróthea Fannon, 2023.

 

 

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