HERE: a meditation on identity, locality, and reconnection

Coming to Sydney’s inner west at Annandale Creative Arts Centre on May 30, 2022 – HERE is a meditation on identity, locality, and reconnection in the wake of isolation told through a collaboration of music, words, and visuals.

classikON spoke to composer Paul Castles, one of the organisers of the project, to find out more…

classikON: How did the concept come about?

Paul Castles: The coronavirus lockdown resulted in a lot of downtime for performing artists, which led us to search for ways to practice our craft and connect with each other and audiences. This concert came out of those efforts and was given life by the Inner West Council and Create NSW.

We knew we wanted to do something with a sense of place and specificity so we started looking at the elements we had on hand and the ones we wanted to create. Both existing and new works of poetry and music generated an interplay between themselves, organically suggesting a theme: transition, connection to physical place in a moment in time, and the movement towards renewal.

Who are the artists involved and why did you choose them – or why did you choose each other?

The project started with funding from the Inner West Council so almost all of our contributing artists are locals who have collaborated in various ways over the years: Nicole W. Lee (poet-performer), Alicia Crossley (recorder), Andrew Smith (saxophone), Emily Granger (harp), Tristan Coelho (piano), and four composers – myself Paul Castles, Alice Chance, Tristan Coelho and Anthony Moles.

Two of the works are commissions from recently released albums: “Inhaltations” by Alice Chance, from Bass Instincts by Alicia Crossley, and “In Transit” by Tristan Coelho, which is the title track of Emily Granger’s new album. Andrew Smith will also premiere a new work by Anthony Moles. The biggest piece in the program, “End of the Earth”, is part of a larger collaboration between Nicole W. Lee and myself; a poetic-musical narrative exploration of Australian identity and connection to the land. This was one of the first works we programmed, so her poetry has naturally been centred in the show. There are also poetic contributions from Sibyl Kempson from the United States and Mkhululi Mabija from South Africa.

Everything is underscored visually by Charlotte Fetherston’s art, which she’s created in response to the music and text. This visual narrative is the unifying throughline that binds the whole show together.

What can audience members expect at the performance?

A relaxed but carefully imagined one hour conceptual concert of interwoven music, poetry, and visuals. It’s intended to be a unified show that’s experienced from beginning to end and captures a sense of neighbourliness, intimacy, and reflection.

I’m a classically trained composer who spent over a decade based in New York working primarily in collaborative storytelling forms, and I’m really inspired by how the abstract emotional experience of music converses with and reshapes our perception. This is a concert, not a narrative experience, but it’s driven by the idea of creating a one hour expressive world which the audience can inhabit and then depart. Hopefully they bring something from it into the greater context of their life outside the venue.

Can you share a snippet of the poetry?

This collaboration has formed a sort of ‘inner west collective’ of artists. Do you have any plans to work together again in the future?

Though this project was grounded in a specific place and moment of time, we’re looking forward to presenting it more widely after its local premiere. I’m always very interested in how to reframe the concert experience for modern audiences, and I hope this experimentation with music, poetry, and visuals, and the ways they speak to each other will help inspire more approaches like this from us or others in the future.

Tickets are available to HERE here