You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘contemporary art song’ tag.
Michael Lampard performing as The Soldier and accompanist Alan Hicks at the Canberra premiere in March 2018, The Street Theatre (Image credit: Shelly Higgs/The Street Theatre)
Book launches make me want to vomit.
My own book launches.
Of course, it is wonderful to have a crowd of people help celebrate your new book, but it’s also stressful. Will the speakers be entertaining? Will I make a fool of myself? Yes, launches make me feel sick; or, at the least, make me want to head for the hills.
Which is why, at the world premiere of The Weight of Light, a song cycle, in Canberra earlier this year, it was surprising to feel positively calm in the foyer before the performance: I drank mineral water, I chatted, I gave and received embraces, and all the while I was relaxed and happy. But then – but then! – the bells rang and the audience entered the theatre and as the lights went down I could feel my heart making bone-shaking explosions. How was the audience going to respond? Was the work inherently problematic? And why had I been so naïve to think I could produce a text to be sung?
Boom! went the thing in my chest…
*
Keep reading at ArtsHub, which published this piece on 23 July 2018. Thanks to Richard Watts.
Shit’s just got real.
Those were the words from the commissioner of The Weight of Light, Paul Scott-Williams, after I tweeted a picture of the poster for the show (below).
Last Friday afternoon I had dropped into the Street Theatre in Canberra to chat with the show’s director, and there it was, the poster, beaming beautifully from the entrance. Needless to say, I was gobsmacked: not only is the poster exquisite – the art work is by Australian visual artist Katy Mutton – but, to be frank, I never thought I would have the opportunity to write for performance. Or have a full-sized poster outside a theatre…in the national capital.
But here we are. And it’s wonderful.
A thing of beauty, and nerves, and excitement.
As I’ve written before, The Weight of Light has been in development since late 2013, when Paul, the director of the Goulburn Regional Conservatorium, and I had a coffee in Canberra; he wanted a contemporary song-cycle that would be relevant to current social concerns. We chose masculinity (these days that word would be preceded by ‘toxic’) as the core theme, though it’s also about war, home, and healing – and the show is not without love, too.
The story involves an Australian soldier who has come home from another tour in Afghanistan: he has a dark secret, but, as he soon finds out, so does his family. The music has been composed by James Humberstone from the Sydney Conservatorium, is being directed by Caroline Stacey from the Street Theatre in Canberra, and will be performed by Melbourne-based baritone Michael Lampard and Alan Hicks, one of Australia’s foremost accompanists.
We go into a two-week rehearsal stage starting on 19 December. Yikes.
A short video of the creative development sessions we held in December at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music can be found here. (It includes footage of me laughing, possible in all the wrong places.) A brief Q&A with yours truly can be found here; I talk a little about what it is like to work on a collaborative project, and provide some insights into how James and I developed the songs. Also, a short piece about the making of The Weight of Light that I wrote for Resonate, the magazine of the Australian Music Centre, can be found here.
What does all this feel like?
Preliminary staging ideas by Imogen Keen and Caroline Stacey, from the Street Theatre in Canberra
Exciting. Terrifying. Exposing.
Especially when Caroline showed me the drawings (above) for the staging – it really does feel as though the show is becoming ‘real’.
If you’re in the ACT region in early March, it would be really great to see you at one of the performances!
Under the counter or a flutter in the dovecote 