| [purgatorio] POPOPERA is a guitar piece written for seven dancers who, previous to creating the piece, did not know how to play guitar. It is a collaboration between Emio Greco and Pieter Scholten of Amerstdam's Emio Greco/PC dance company, and Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon. They met in 2000 after Gordon was intrigued by Emio Greco/PC's "otherwordly energy that, when on the verge of cresting, just continues to get wilder and wilder." After much discussion, Gordon proposed a piece with dancers playing guitars.
The idea was met with reservations but five years later the dance company and Gordon met again in Massachusetts where they finally got to work. The dancers committed themselves to learning with admirable intensity and careful training from Bryce Dessner (guitarist for The National & Clogs) and Katie Geissinger (singer with Meredith Monk and on the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson opera, Einstein on the Beach). The dancers continued to train with Gordon and guitar coach Taylor Levine during intense workshops that took place in three countries over three years.
The result was a 75-minute dance piece choreographed by Greco and Scholten that climaxed with the pieces on this recording, 20 minutes of bracing tension wire guitar. It debuted in June 2008 at the Holland Music Festival. Gordon recalls seeing the first performance, fondly noting “the moment when all of a sudden they stopped being dancers and became musicians." The music stands by itself. Gordon retuned the guitars to create the dense sounding harmonies heard throughout the piece -- a crystalline and dissonant noise akin to the sound of catharsis writ in slow motion. |
|
Facebook
Twitter
Contact Artist
Add to Profile
Add to station