Musical Utopias #6: The Art of Doing Nothing

Sometimes you have to give in to the rolling waves

Stephanie Pan & Ensemble Klang – The Art of Doing Nothing

Stephanie Pan and Ensemble Klang open the festival with The Art of Doing Nothing, a feminist manifesto about listening to yourself and the world around you. About standing still. About not always swimming against the current, but sometimes just letting yourself be carried on the waves. And then make conscious choices. Saving power to explode with power.

The Art of Doing Nothing celebrates soft ‘feminine’ qualities such as intuition, doubt and vulnerability. It invites you to let go and embrace the magical space of not knowing.
Together with Ensemble Klang, Stephanie Pan takes you on a sonic journey through rich landscapes, pounding and gritty beats, distilled silence, and lush dramatic song.

Ela Orleans – Night Voyager

Set to soaring music featuring live synthesiser, theremin and violin, footage of the 1969 Apollo moon mission is repurposed to retell the narrative of Night Thoughts, a nine-poem cycle written by Edward Young in the 1740s. Night Voyager marries visuals from the NASA archives, capturing fearful but optimistic astronauts and their anxious loved ones left at home, with Young’s meditation on death – and speaks, too, of the possibility of cultural forgetting, as in Young’s poem, now scarcely remembered but called in its time “the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced”.

Ela Orleans performance of Night Voyager is supported by PRS Foundation’s Beyond Borders, a co-commissioning and touring programme run in partnership with Creative Scotland, Arts Council of Wales, Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Arts Council of Ireland /An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

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