Meet the Composer

Hahn Rowe

The new work will be an evening length project for 6 dancers with choreography by company founder John Jasperse and a commissioned score by composer Hahn Rowe for cello, violin and percussion. The work will explore how we might manifest the intangible, by imparting a shimmering quality to the otherwise mundane. This transformation is central to aesthetic and (dare we suggest) religious experience. We want to explore how, through performance, we might generate a "fog" of wonder. The music will be crucial in that it will interact with the dance to create an engaging, captivating (but sometimes disorienting) experience for the audience. We will build immersive musical and kinesthetic sections, employing extremes in fullness of dynamic and timbre within the music (and in the texture and structure of the dance) while alternating these textures with adjacent spaces of silence and stillness, creating an almost architectural relationship to temporal and physical space. Instead of traditional staging where the musicians perform in a fixed location, we will vary the spatial orientation of the musicians along with the other performers, integrating them into the theatrical space. Additionally, electronics will be used to manipulate the location of the music in the audio field. This interactive approach will also extend into the scoring. Flexible cells of musical material (as opposed to fixed notation) will instigate or react to actions performed by the dancers, morphing from clouds of immersive sound material into sections of well defined, concrete notation.

World premiere: September 2011