Invitation: Immersive performance experiments

Performed at Fitzroy Salon in September 2024, was another step in my experiments towards an immersive performance experience.  A featured work was a full performance of Tributaries, originally commissioned and written with the assistance of the City of Melbourne in 2024.

The project grew out of my yearly visits to Native Dog Creek in New England NSW, a gorgeous place of evocative red grasses that would change enormously depending on the seasons and rainfall, as well as a refuge for wild dingo populations.  It had became a kind of pilgrimage for me to visit there as a way of communing with father after his death, it was his wish to have his ashes scattered there and in my walks, observations and time spent there, an idea developed to express the different sides of the place, and the different meanings it held for me, through a larger composition that would entail film from various sites along the walks at Native Dog Creek and field recordings.  To create five very different faces it was written for voice guitar and percussion in different combinations.  I had also found a poem, Falls Country, by Judith Wright written by her about the high country and it’s people from her time near Armidale, and incorporated snippets of it into the live performance.

1.       Breath  for guitar and voice

2.       Restless for guitar and loop station 

3.       Colours  for voice, guitar and percussion

4.       Together for voice and percussion

5.       Tributary  for solo guitar

We also presented the premiere of an arrangement of Birds by Sally Whitwell for soprano, guitar and marimba, performed in conjunction with a short film.  One of those songs, Nightingale: