Donald Gordon Creative Arts Award Winners At Infecting The City

The Gordon Institute of Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA) partners with the Africa Centre in Infecting the (Mother) City with public art projects, from 12 – 16 March 2013.

In line with GIPCA’s interdisciplinary mandate,Trespassing
Permitted
engages with “off limit” zones within the performance space. The initiators ofthis work, Donald Gordon Creative Arts Award winners Mike Rossi and Ulrich Suesse, have created a crossover performance, featuring acclaimed musician Feya Faku on trumpet, and dance artists Nicola Elliott, Alan Parker and Richard Antrobus.

The composition process was informed by exploring and experimenting with boundaries; by developing new musical sound
and by collaborating in music and mixed media productions. Performers are not constrained by detailed notated scores; they are free to move, participate and improvise with their own contributions – Trespassing Permitted. Improvisation encroaches on composition, jazz invades western classical, African and European sound spectra are interpolated, dancers meddle in the creation of sound. The programme moves from individual performances to an increasingly participatory performance, with parallels being drawn to the reopening and re-activation of city spaces.

Old and new converge with the Cape Consort’s exploration of early
vocal repertoire in Shades of Grey, a fractured audioscape of late medieval European and 19th-century colonial culture in historically informed interpretation. The work is the result of a Donald
Gordon Creative Arts Award, awarded to musicologist Rebekka
Sandmeier.

Manuscript 4.b.5 of the Grey Collection in the National Library of South Africa – an office book from diocese of Münster – contains the late medieval chants for the office of St Liudger. Late medieval
chant is often seen as “impure” or “decadent” by plainchant scholars and not much is known about it, both in terms of scholarly research and performance. This dearth of knowledge gives the opportunity for experiments such as the use of isons and early improvised polyphony or composed polyphony. In this regard, Shades of Grey follows the tradition of historically informed performance.

In order to ground the music in space and time, it will be interspersed with music from the time of George Grey’s government, and substituted with readings from Grey’s writings on the collection and current views on his government. The music can be perceived as if through an aural kaleidoscope, which even though it fragments the image, unites the fragments into a pattern: the original veneration for the saint in 15th-century Münster, Grey’s inclusion of the music in the collection during his governance of the Cape Colony, today’s research on early music and its historically
informed performance.

The Cape Consortis comprised of Tessa Roos and Vasti Knoesen (alto), Nick de Jager and Lance Phillip (tenor), Charles Ainslie and
Patrick Cordery (bass), and Erik Dippenaar (organ).

These performances are presented by The Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts, as part of the 2013 programme for the Infecting the City Public Arts Festival. Trespassing Permitted
will be performed on Church Square at 20:00 on Tuesday 12 March and Thursday 14 March as part of Programme B. Shades of Grey will be performed at the Slave Church in Long Street at 12:30 on Thursday 14 March and 10:30 on Saturday 16 March as part of Programme E. For more information on the Festival, see
www.infectingthecity.com or www.gipca.uct.ac.za

By Andrew Germishuys

Founder of SAMDB | Actor | Armourer | Tech Enthusiast With over two decades in the film industry, I'm a seasoned actor and skilled armourer. I hold numerous certifications in acting and filmmaking, complemented by degrees and diplomas in IT and technology, giving me a unique blend of creative and technical expertise. When I'm not on set or in the workshop, you'll find me immersed in the world of gaming and VR, fuelling my passion for cutting-edge technology. Connect with me: X / Twitter Facebook Instagram Mastodon Threads Explore my work on SAMDB IMDb

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