Output details

That Second Realm, dance-piece for flute, oboe and string quartet, with seven dancers, based on Dante’s Purgatorio, choreographed by Susie Crow (duration 16 minutes). Perfomed twice by Cambridge Contemporary Dance and twice by Ballet in Small Spaces (Oxford).

That Second Realm is the result of a series of workshops held between November 2008 and April 2009 that involved eight dancers (from Cambridge Contemporary Dance), choreographer Susie Crow (ex-Covent Garden), renowned Dante scholar Robin Kirkpatrick (University of Cambridge), six musicians, and myself; these workshops took place alongside other collaborative explorations of different aspects of Dante’s Divine Comedy involving a wide range of artists of different kinds (sculptors, poets, film-makers, actors, etc.)

That Second Realm reflects a close engagement with the second book of the Comedy, Purgatory: it re-imagines a series of specific poetic images and qualities in a sequence of nine highly compressed dramatic scenes, which progress from the opening scene of arrival on the shores of the island to the final encounter with Matelda in the Garden of Earthly Paradise. The music is precisely involved with the visual, staged dimension of the piece: the flautist and oboist take on-stage personae at certain points, where their music enters a different realm, in terms of both tempo and topic, from that of the quartet. Throughout the work rhythm plays a fundamental role in the music as well as the dance, conceived in close engagement with Prof. Kirkpatrick’s research on the dynamic quality of metre and image and the pervasiveness of breathing and bodily movement in Dante’s verse.