Writer: Pamela Carter
Composer: Valgeir Sigurðsson
Director: Stewart Laing
Musical Director: Jonathan Morton
Producer: Raw Material
Musicians/Chorus: Scottish Ensemble; Vocalists: Ruby Philogene, Jodie Landau and featuring Alison O’Donnell as Narrator
Two bodies, suspended in darkness.
A team of surgeons, poised as one.
A gathered chorus, singing of life and death.
And a human heart, speeding through the city…
Unfurling through song, words and a visionary live score for strings and electronics, ‘We Are In Time’ follows the extraordinary journey of two strangers, one giving life, the other receiving it. Musicians are at once performers, chorus and specialist team as the drama between renowned mezzo-soprano Ruby Philogene and vocalist Jodie Landau unfolds, and time ticks on.
The result is a thought-provoking meditation on life, and on what it means to live; on the frailty and strength of human beings, working together, with science, against nature, in search of the superhuman.
About the artists
Pamela Carter is a writer and dramaturgist creating ideas-driven, conceptual pieces that seem to straddle a world of theatre, visual art and performance art with a distinctly continental European resonance. In her regular encounters with Laing’s Untitled Projects, her writing sparks with ideas and the obvious alchemy of their collaborative working: ‘The Salon Project’, Paul Bright’s ‘Confessions of a Justified Sinner’ and ‘Slope’.
Currently Associate Director with National Theatre of Scotland, Stewart Laing‘s celebrated reputation is entangled with Untitled Projects, the company he formed to create one-off, adventurous, truly genre-defying events. His work pushes at the future, probes the social obsessions of the present, and re-frames cultural history; it also provokes on an intellectual level, and entertains on a human one. His training as a (Tony award-winning) theatre designer roots his creations in extraordinary visuals; his extensive work with operatic companies showcases a deep understanding of music-as-spectacle.
Valgeir Sigurðsson is a musical polymath of enviable acclaim. His list of collaborators as composer, producer and engineer is enviable in its name-dropping variety: Björk and Feist on one hand; Hilary Hahn, Nico Muhly and City of London Sinfonia on another, all approached with genre-fluidity and polished creativity. His own music is another thing altogether. Says famed journalist Paul Morley, on his latest album: “music that is made in direct, elusive opposition to the limiting, spoiling restrictions of classification, music not made to belong anywhere in particular, or music made to belong somewhere in a future not yet determined”
Presented by Scottish Ensemble & Untitled Projects in association with Perth Theatre at Horsecross Arts
Scottish Ensemble & Untitled Projects: We Are In Time