Fall and then Rise programme

2023/24 SEASON CONCERT PROGRAMME

NWANDO EBIZIE: WRITING THE FUTURE Wednesday 15 November 2023, 7pm & 9pm Colour Factory, Hackney Wick

NWANDO EBIZIE: WRITING THE FUTURE Wednesday 15 November 2023, Colour Factory Nwando Ebizie Fall and Then Rise on a Soft Winter’s Morning

(London Sinfonietta commission, world premiere) Chisato Minamimura dancer Nwando Ebizie vocals Jennifer Muteteli assistant director Natalie Sharp design concept Bethany Wells design realisation Sophie Stone access and outreach consultant Tom Richards technical production manager Harry Wheeler video editing Simon Hendry sound design Derek Szeko projection mapping Chloe Rooke conductor London Sinfonietta: Mark van de Wiel* clarinet Phoebe Clarke double bass Lizzie Bass harp Joe Richards percussion Oliver Lowe percussion

*London Sinfonietta Principal Player The London Sinfonietta is grateful to Arts Council England for its support of the ensemble, as well as the many other individuals, trusts and businesses who enable us to realise our ambitions.

The work of the London Sinfonietta is supported by the John Ellerman Foundation, and the London Sinfonietta’s Writing the Future programme is generously supported by Michael & Patricia McLaren-Turner, The Boltini Trust, Jerwood Arts, PRS for Music Foundation’s The Open Fund for Organisations, and The Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation. This performance is supported by the Southbank Centre, the Jerwood New Work Fund, Jerwood Arts Commissioning the Future Fund, the Hinrichsen Foundation and the Vaughan Williams Foundation.

This concert has been co-produced by Atelier Nwando and London Sinfonietta

WELCOME Welcome to tonight’s concert

Access Information

When we launched our programme called Writing the Future we aimed to give composers the chance to make work which not only stretched their own practice, but also challenged us as the London Sinfonietta in how we may perform and what we may present. Tonight, Nwando Ebizie is doing just that – creating a typically ambitious new work in collaboration with performers from other art forms and will a highly inventive staging and event format.

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We are grateful to all the musicians and artists who are performing tonight, and to Nwando, her production team and to the Colour Factory for welcoming this project into their venue. We are also grateful to the funders of our Writing the Future project which has now made four new pieces – all of which have been impressive is so many different ways.

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We hope you enjoy the evening.

Andrew Burke Chief Executive and Artistic Director

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The performance is 1 hour long and is a relaxed performance There are 3 parts to the music with roughly 10 minutes break in between each one where audience members are welcome to purchase drinks from the bar. We will also give out small tasters of tea and popcorn There is step free access to the performance space.

Latecomers will be admitted There will not be any flashing or moving lights On arrival there will be a light bag search by Colour Factory’s Security Team Stewards fluent in BSL to support guests on arrival All performances are relaxed. This means you can move or make noise if you need to.

You can go in and out of the performance space Please note, photography and filming will be taking place before and during the performance

Fall and Then Rise on a Soft Winter’s Morning The piece consists of six parts: Interlude 1: Embrace the Space Ten minutes to settle into the space: explore, unwind, find where you want to be i. I could have fallen Ensemble performance with voice and BSL-inspired dance A romantic prelude A doomed love A painful love Hanging on the edge of a precipice Interlude 1: Embrace the Taste Please feel free to move around during this time Take Tea Share Popcorn Pass it round, pass it On ii. Dream Ensemble performance with voice and BSL-inspired dance The pieces of you Falling apart Transformation The body is lost To a crushing weight Interlude 2: The Three Embraces Please feel free to move around during this time Embrace A Balloon Embrace Your Self Embrace One An Other I only have eyes For You iii. Rise of the Clowns Ensemble performance with voice and BSL-inspired dance Meeting at the Crossroads A dance to the death Calling on the ancestors Snow End: Embrace the Night Make your way softly into the night

Programme Notes The inception of the idea for this piece arose when I played a gig at a disabled Arts festival.

This ritual live-art gig invited the audience to hug balloons and whisper their fears into them.

Afterwards, a group of Deaf people approached me and thanked me for this element. They pointed out that the piece worked well for them – not only because it was so visual, but the use of balloons was something they used at school. Some could hear their own voices by using them, and for others, it meant they could feel the vibrations of the music. This really touched me – and I decided to make a sensory world based on balloons, floating, vibration. Where everybody could have analogous sensory experiences.

I then started working with Deaf dancer and movement artist Chisato Minamimura. I gave her the text of the piece and we worked to translate it into British Sign Language, which was a really fascinating process. BSL is very different from English, so you can’t do a one-to-one translation, and it also has a choreographic logic to it. I’m a dancer as well, and I like to work backwards from the dance to the music. So I reflected the musicality and the rhythm and the expression of the dance in the music.

My research into this area is always ongoing. Questions that have come up during the process of writing this piece, like ‘What if I wrote

from a different perspective, after now beginning to understand BSL?’ But generally the idea is that you come into a one-hour experience, and that when you leave, you feel like something’s happened; something’s changed a bit in your inner world.

This piece is probably the most ‘classical’ thing I have written. The beginning is quite experimental and descriptive of the movement. It’s like a feeling of anticipation. When I was writing I was thinking a lot about Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, and quite a lot about Mahler. There’s also a klezmer influence from an old friend of mine who plays the clarinet, mixed with an Angela Carter reference.

Angela Carter’s Nights At The Circus inspired a lot of the performance’s third act. The scenes in her writing are so real and alive to me, particularly a scene at the end of the book, set in Siberia, which has haunted me for years. In essence, it involved clowns and a snow tornado, but it also transformed in my head to being about revolutionary fervour, a changing of epochs, so it’s a nod to that. I had a scene of different spirits from different Black ritual cultures, meeting to create this revolutionary moment.

I started working on it on the design concept with Nat Sharp quite a while ago. I told her I wanted balloons in the concert, and so she made some really beautiful designs. She also made Chisato’s big, beautiful costume, a voluminous silk dress that can show interesting movement. Nat also created all the visuals projected onto balloons.

In the future, I would like to explore further the ritual elements in the interludes. The main difference between ritual and performance is that the roles are more delineated. The possible impact of inviting people to perform roles other than audience and spectator is particularly interesting.

Nwando Ebizie

Artist Biographies NWANDO EBIZIE An unclassifiable polymath, British-Nigerian multidisciplinary artist Nwando Ebizie fabulates speculative fictions and alternate realities at the intersection of live art, experimental music and multi-sensory installation. She proposes new myths, rituals and provocations for perceptual change, radical care and transformation of the self and community, drawing from science fiction, Black Atlantic ritual cultures, biophilia, neuroscience, her own neurodivergency and Nigerian heritage.

Awards include an Ivor Novello nomination, an Oram Award, and the Steve Reid Innovation award. Her debut album was released in 2022 on Matthew Herbert’s Accidental Records to critical acclaim.

Commissions include compositions for Aurora Orchestra, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Zubin Kanga, Opera North and Sky Arts.

Her work including live art gigs, sound art installations and curated happenings, has been performanced at Barbican, Southbank Centre, Wellcome Collection, Tempo Festival (Rio de Janeiro), Hepworth Wakefield, Melbourne Science Gallery, Tate Britain, Art/Science Museum Singapore and Rewire Festival.

CHISATO MINAMIMURA Chisato Minamimura is a Deaf performance artist, choreographer and BSL art guide. Born in Japan, now based in London, Chisato has created, performed and taught internationally and is currently a Work Place artist at The Place. Chisato has been involved in aerial performances with Graeae

Theatre Company, London’s Paralympic Opening Ceremony 2012 and Rio’s 2016 Paralympic Cultural Olympiad. Chisato trained at Trinity Laban in London and holds a BA in Japanese Painting and MA from Yokohama National University.

Chisato approaches choreography and performance making from her unique perspective as a Deaf artist, experimenting with and exploring the visualisation of sound and music. By using dance and digital technology, Chisato aims to share her experiences of sensory perception and human encounters.

CHLOE ROOKE British conductor Chloe Rooke (born 1996) was Assistant Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic in 22/23, also conducting them in concerts and recordings.

She came to international attention after winning the Contemporary Award at the first International Conducting Competition in Rotterdam in May 2022 and the Audience Prize at the Donatella Flick-LSO Conducting Competition in 2021. She was subsequently invited to conduct the LSO in family concerts at the Barbican and made her mark at Kings Place with the London Sinfonietta and in a New Year’s concert with the BBC Concert Orchestra. In Autumn 2023, she returns to conduct the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic at the Concertgebouw and is reinvited to the Residentie Orkest. She also debuts with Orchestre National de Lille and London Mozart Players.

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LONDON SINFONIETTA One of the world’s leading contemporary music ensembles, London Sinfonietta was formed in 1968, and is a Resident Orchestra at the Southbank Centre and Artistic Associate at Kings Place, with a busy touring schedule. We have commissioned over 450 works and premiered hundreds more.

We experiment constantly, working with the best artists, as well as young people and the public to produce projects involving other art forms. We challenge perceptions by commissioning work which addresses today’s society. We support musical creativity in schools and communities across the UK, and provide unparalleled opportunities for young performers and conductors to train for their professional future.

We continue to innovate with our digital Channel, featuring video programmes and podcasts about new music. We created Steve Reich’s Clapping Music App for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, and have an extensive back catalogue of recordings. londonsinfonietta.org.uk Find us on social media: @Ldn_Sinfonietta @london.sinfonietta LondonSinfonietta LondonSinfonietta london.sinfonietta

WRITING THE FUTURE Since it was established in 1968, the London Sinfonietta has commissioned over 450 pieces of new music. From working with the best emerging and established composers, to collaborating with artists from other genres and disciplines, and bringing music outside of the concert hall to clubs, art galleries and public spaces, we constantly push the boundaries of what an ensemble can be.

Writing the Future is an open-call programme which supports emerging composers and music creators through the process of making new music with the ensemble, using techniques such as immersive staging, speech transcription, and tapestry as compositional inspiration over a two-year period.

Our four composers for the current round of Writing The Future (2019-22) are Nwando Ebizie, Luke Lewis, Alex Paxton and Alicia Jane Turner.

Go to our Channel to hear recordings of these four exciting new pieces!

SUPPORT US By making a donation to the London Sinfonietta, you can help create world-class new music projects both onstage and online. You can help us reach thousands of young people each year through our composition programmes in schools, and enable us to provide worldclass training to the next generation of talent. londonsinfonietta.org.uk/support-us

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