METAPRAXIS VII: WINTER JOURNEY
Artwork from Pip Woolf’s collection ‘Winterreise’
The Winter Journey is an audiovisual collage, structured on elements taken from or inspired by Franz Schubert‘s Winterreise, narrating refugee memories in their displacement travel to the unknown. It is an openly collaborative venture, initiated as a response to the current humanitarian crisis developing in a global level. This is also leading to the ensemble’s 10th birthday!
A young refugee on a boat stranded in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, is reading what’s left from an old diary: remembering/re-learning his/her own life story.’
As part of this, we are experimenting with blending Schubert’s lieder with notions from Samuel Beckett’s works Krapp’s Last Tape and Ohio Impromptu and Winterreise-inspired artworks by visual artist Pip Woolf. There has been considerable research in academia and elsewhere on connecting the above (there is a very interesting joint between Beckett and Winterreise, and you might experience some of that in our show), and we are aiming to take it further by linking them with our refugee story. But the cherry on top of this venture are the new works we commisioned to composers and sound artists (up to now: Lucy Callen, Daniel Fígols, Scott Mc Laughlin, and Ruta Vitkauskaite), and the existing works we are incorporating (up to now: Andie Brown, Gregory Emfietzis, Christopher Fox and Naomi Pinnock) for vintage reel-to-reel tape machines, voices and instruments, and… mobile phones!
So far, this journey has-taken/is-taking us to the Hundred Years Gallery (Feb’19), Omnibus Theatre (Apr’19) and Cafe OTO (Jun’19), and the musicians involved include Guillermina Chivite (violin), Gregory Emfietzis (violin/aux.instr), Daniel Figols (cello/electronics), Neil Georgeson (piano), Angela Hui (percussion), Ilze Ikse (flutes), Loukia Loulaki (cello), Myrto Loulaki (voice), Damian Posse (d.bass), Alex Roberts (Clarinet).
* With this opportunity, we are fundraising for the refugee-supporting organisations: THREE PEAS, Big Leaf Foundation, and Hay, Brecon & Talgarth Sanctuary for Refugees (click on their names to learn more about their extremely important work in the UK and Greece).
