VIOLIN AND ROPE - TRIPLE BILL

By Gisele Edwards and Marcus Barcham-Stevens

Art of Rope
Performed by Gisele Edwards

Muscles burning, the rope pressing against your flesh, the gasp of the fall.

Art of Rope is a short, simple and humorous look inside the body of a rope artist. This playful piece demonstrates the emotional and physical A-Z of climbing a rope, disclosing the real experience to the audience and giving them a sense of what it is like to be inside the mind of an acrobat.

Emerging from a residency with Complicite founder Jos Houben, Art of Rope is a playful exploration that seeks to heighten both the spectator’s senses and awareness of the space they share with the performer. Gisele breaks the silence of the circus artist and closes the gap between artist and audience, giving them a simple, real and humorous sense of what it is like to be inside the mind and body of a rope artist.



Violin and Rope
Performed by Gisele Edwards and Marcus Barcham-Stevens

Leading performers in their field, aerialist Gisele Edwards and violinist Marcus Barcham-Stevens create a piece that explores the marriage of movement and music in space. Featuring music by Bach interspersed with new works by composers from the worlds of jazz, folk and classical (Dave Brubeck, Pete Cooper and John Woolrich), the piece creates a poetic and animated moving dialogue between a rope artist and a violinist.

"Violin & Rope came from an idea I had performing with the Dante Quartet two years ago. I was keen to collaborate with a musician and explore new ways in which audiences might engage with classical and contemporary music. The rope seemed the right tool to do this, given the immediate connection: the rope artist playing on the rope, the string player playing on his strings. Creating a dynamic tension between the two genres, the audience have a sense of entering the music, and engaging with it in a new way." Gisele Edwards

Devised under the guidance of Lucy Bailey. Music originally performed and commissioned by Simon Blendis of the Schubert Ensemble in 2000 as part of the Bach 250th anniversary celebration. Violin and Rope was selected for ROH2 Firsts season at the Linbury Studios, Royal Opera House in 2006.



Chaconne
Bach, performed by Marcus Barcham-Stevens

Fingers burning, horse-hair grating on gut… the violinist explores one of the pinnacles of Baroque violin-writing, Bach's dark yet majestic Chaconne. How is so much created from so little, how does the solo violin create an illusion of an entire consort of instruments?

As Bach wrote to Clara Schumann: “On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived this piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind”