Cage performance at Bath International Music Festival

The realisation of Cage’s _______, ___ ______ CIRCUS ON ______ which I made with  colleagues and students at Bath Spa University was performed last Friday, and was reviewed positively by Ivan Hewett in the Telegraph. We used Nights at the Circus (the circus reference is circumstantial) by the Festival’s featured writer Angela Carter as the source book for the piece, which provides instructions for translating a book into ‘a performance without actors’ which is ‘literary and musical or one or the other’, resulting in the title Bowbarovsk, a Travelling Circus on Nights at the Circus. Fragments of the text could be heard throughout the realisation, drawing on the book’s narrative, which moves from London to Petersburg and then to Siberia, following the movement of a group of circus performers at the end of the 19^th Century. The mesostics were created by MA Creative Writing students, whilst I collated the recordings of places and sounds mentioned in the book. The relevant musics we used were principally circus marches and waltzes, and were played by musicians from the Music Department. The title is a portmanteau of the first and last places mentioned in the book, and references the changes of location in the narrative.

We’re making a film of the performance, and I’ll post that soon when it’s done.