CHOREOGRAPHER: Marina Mascarell
COMPOSER: Nick Wales
SET & COSTUME DESIGN: Lauren Brincat and Leah Giblin
LIGHTING DESIGNER: Damien Cooper

Overview

Fiction is our new reality, and we devour it frenetically. Old structures are rupturing and the void is being filled by billions of personal stories. This piece poses many questions: the body's meaning and its capacity to transform; the relationship with technology, and the connection with nature.

The Shell, A Ghost, The Host & The Lyrebird is the journey of some bodies towards the unknown, as mutant creatures in an oneiric valley. A place where the dancers abandon binarisms and old forms to embrace a transition process from what we were and are to what we will be. Bodies are penetrated by a constantly transforming place, decentralising the human, shifting our focus to still have a chance to survive. Hybridising bodies, containers of information, like shells, adapting to life in continuous transition; as lyrebirds, learning from the natural and the artificial world to survive; as hosts of a finite world, in an attempt to decode the old and understand where those ghosts will go or if we will succumb as well.

Music Note:

The music for The Shell, A Ghost, The Host & The Lyrebird has been influenced by a number of factors; traditional instruments (pianos, strings), the natural world (mostly Australian with some New Zealand guests) and the digitisation and rupture of these elements. As a team of collaborators, we have been interested in a potential evolution, from the present reality towards a cyber reality. Should this new reality be positive? Could it be? Could the duality between the natural world and the digital world coexist in harmony? Is there a positivity and hope in this potential evolutionary path?

The score is programmatic and helps to illustrate our ideas though its journey - from more traditional sounds, the natural environment and finally a cathartic deconstruction towards a beautiful and hopeful valley resonating a post renaissance, natural and cyber reality. I have been interested in a performance practice where the musicians and I play as if we are a part of various ecosystems. We have been mimicking the patterns and sounds of both digital and natural environments, like a Lyrebird.

I have made the score with some of my long-time collaborators, Bree van Reyk, Veronique Serret and Jason Noble, and I thank them for their generosity in helping me to realise the music. Thanks also to my sound engineering team, the SIF 309 orchestra team, the Bundanon Trust and at Ukaria Cultural Centre where elements of the score were developed. 

Music Written and Produced by Nick Wales

Percussion    Bree ven Reyk 

Clarinets  Jason Noble 

Violin   Veronique Serret

Baroque Harp  Victor Valdez 

String Orchestra - Bulgarian Symphony - SIF 309 

Conductor - Deyan Pavlov

Orchestral Producer - Vladimir Dimitrov

Nick Wales - Pianos, Viola, Percussion, Electronics 

Recorded at Electric Ave Sydney, Ukaria Cultural Centre, Bundanon Trust, Doli Media Studio Sofia Bulgaria. 

Mixed by Bob Scott at Dodgy Sound 

Engineered by Phil Punch, Jem Hoppe, Bob Scott and Nick Wales

PHOTOGRAPHY: Pedro Greig