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Give me your blessing for I go to a foreign land

This project formed part of my AHRC Fellowship exploring how recent technological innovation could transform the existing structures of opera and music theatre. The fellowship project also saw the transformation of the world by technology as a traumatic process demanding artistic exploration.

This project focused on the experience of thresholds between known and unknown - psychological, cultural, technological – as articulated in a historic work responding to an earlier period of technological change: Stravinsky’s and Nijinska’s dance cantata Les Noces (1923).

The project title derives from words sung by a Russian peasant girl who perceives the wedding ritual as a threshold to the unknown. Stravinsky’s text and music incorporated ethnic materials, bringing these into a relationship with modernity, depicting peasant rituals as coercive processes and presenting an image of modernity where individuals are effaced in favour of the many. Stravinsky’s music creates an equation between machinic technologies of the modern age and more archaic social forms. Our project related this reading of historic experience to digital technological transformations, reworking and challenging Stravinsky, repositioning new media tools in relation to performance traditions and materials. The composite outcome (music theatre performance, print publication and prototype web-object) accented thresholds, translation, de-contextualisation and migration across different media.

In the performance, an opera singer, dancers and folk performers became channels for each others’ art-forms, navigating media from iron-age percussion to virtual avatars, and reversing the flow of materials (from 'folk' to 'high' culture and back).

In print, photographic sequences in a book on theatrical intermediality encouraged readers to migrate from one technology (book) to another (web) by following a trail of hand-drawn URLs.

In the web-object, a ‘Make Your Own Russian Folk Song’ device, and downloadable flat-pack ballet studio, encouraged users to stage their own rituals for upload to video publication.