Night Songs will be a new music theatre work for family audiences.
The events of Night Songs take place over the course of one night, from nightfall to sunrise.
Two orphaned brothers – Tom, 12, and Jack, early 20s – live in a battered caravan on a wasteland in the outskirts of a large industrial city. Every evening, Jack goes into the city to scavenge (and perhaps steal) whatever he can, to make their meagre living. While Jack is gone, Tom – who has never dared to confess to Jack his fear of the dark or his loneliness – invents a companion for himself, Jake. In many ways, Jake is a magical version of Jack: older, weirder, with wings, wearing a crumpled top hat and ragged coat tails. What Jake loves to do is to tell stories, and Tom loves to hear them.
The idea will be to create a work of theatre that engages the imaginative possibilities of narrative to create a night of theatrical contrasts, visual, musical and emotional. The stories told by Tom and Jake will be drawing on various traditions of storytelling, from Aesop’s Fables to Til Eulenspiegel, Gypsy folk tales, fairy tales and myths. Some will be sung, some will be spoken and some will be enacted.
GREEN ROOM MUSIC
Green Room Music will work with Mind’s Eye on the creative development of this new work, with an outstanding team of creative artists: poet/critic and librettist Alison Croggon, dramatist/librettist Daniel Keene, and composer/performer/music educator and artistic director of Green Room Music, Andrée Greenwell.
ANDRÉE GREENWELL
Andrée Greenwell is an award winning composer, performer, music director and music producer of unique music-theatre works. In 1999 Andrée established Green Room Music as a platform to create innovative music, screen and multi-media works.
Green Room Music has employed artists of excellence from popular culture, new media, filmmaking, theatre, art music and opera including: Deborah Conway (voice), Justine Clarke (voice/actor), Jeff Duff (voice), Max Sharam (voice), Christine Douglas (voice), Mark Seymour (voice), Hugo Race (voice), Phil Slater (trumpet), James Nightingale (clarinet/sax), Marjorie Smith (clarinets/sax), Hope Csuturos (violin), Michael Sheridan (electric guitar), Marshall McGuire (harp), Denise Papaluca (piano), Cameron Undy (electric bass), Robert Davidson (double bass), Jared Underwood (drumkit), and Helpmann award winning designer Dan Potra and AFI award winning cinematographer Toby Oliver.
Works include the acclaimed Dreaming Transportation: Voice Portraits of the First Women of White Settlement at Port Jackson, commissioned by the Sydney Festival 2003, premiering at Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, written by Jordie Albiston. Dreaming Transportation went on to the Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, in 2004. It will be remounted at the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music in 2011.
ABC Radio Arts took the project to further urban, regional and international audiences, recording Dreaming Transportation for CD and full broadcast on Classic FM, then as feature length radio programmes. In Studio - Dreaming Transportation went on to win the Prix Marulic in Croatia in 2005. The song Dreaming Transportation won nest classical composition at the MusicOz Awards, 2004.
The Hanging of Jean Lee, which tells the story of the last woman to be hanged in Australia, was recorded and then fully broadcast by the ABC following its acclaimed premier at Sydney Opera House. Andrée’s short films Medusahead and Laquiem have screened at many international festivals and purchased for television by SBS and KunstKanal, Holland.
Andrée received a Green Room Award 2008 for her score for Venus & Adonis – a co-production between Bell Shakespeare and Malthouse Theatre.
ALISON CROGGON
Born in 1962, Alison Croggon is one of a generation of Australian poets which emerged in the 1990s. She writes in many genres, including criticism, theatre and prose. She is Melbourne theatre critic for the national daily newspaper, The Australian, and keeps a blog of theatre criticism, Theatre Notes, for which she was awarded the 2009 Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year.
Her poetry has been published widely in anthologies and magazines in Australia and overseas. Her most recent poetry publication is Theatre, (Salt Publishing, 2008). Other titles include November Burning (Vagabond Press Rare Objects Series, Sydney, 2004); Mnemosyne, (Wild Honey Press, Ireland, 2001); The Common Flesh (New and Selected Poems) (Arc Publications , UK, 2003) and Attempts at Being (Salt Publishing , UK, 2002).
Her first book of poems, This is the Stone, won the 1991 Anne Elder and Dame Mary Gilmore Prizes. Her novel Navigatio, published by Black Pepper Press, was highly commended in the 1995 Australian/Vogel literary awards and is being translated for publication in France. Her second book of poems, The Blue Gate, was released in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Poetry Prize. Attempts at Being was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards and also was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in the US.
She has toured frequently in the UK and the US, among other things reading at the 2005 Poetry International Festival at Royal Festival Hall in London, the Soundeye International Poetry Festival in Cork, and the New Writing symposium at the University of East Anglia. In 2000 she was the Australia Council Writer in Residence at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge (UK).
Alison Croggon is also the author of the acclaimed young adult fantasy quartet, The Books of Pellinor. The first volume was nominated in two categories in the Aurealis Awards for Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction in December 2002 and named one of the Notable Books of 2003 by the Children's Book Council of Australia. The series has since been released to critical and popular acclaim in the US, the UK and Europe.
Her theatre work includes the operas Gauguin (Melbourne Festival 2000) and The Burrow (Perth Festival, Sydney, Melbourne 1994-95 and broadcast by ABC Radio), both with Michael Smetanin. Her performed plays include Lenz (Melbourne Festival 1996), Samarkand and The Famine (Rules of Thumb season, Red Shed Company, Adelaide 1997 and ABC Radio 1998), Blue (CIA, La Mama, Melbourne and the Street Theatre, Canberra, 2001). ABC Radio commissions include Monologues for an Apocalypse (2001) and Specula (2006). She also wrote lyrics for Confidentially Yours (Playbox Theatre 1998, Hong Kong Festival 1999). She is presently working on a new opera with Smetanin.
Many of her poems have been set to music by various composers, including Smetanin (Skinless Kiss of Angels, Elision New Music Emsemble), Christine McCombe and Margaret Legge-Wilkinson (Canberra New Music Ensemble) and most recently Andreé Greenwell.
She was poetry editor for Overland Extra (1992), Modern Writing (1992-1994) and Voices (1996) and is founding editor of the literary arts journal Masthead.
alisoncroggon.com
DANIEL KEENE
Daniel Keene has written for the theatre since 1979. He has won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Drama twice, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Drama three times, the South Australian Literary Award for Drama, the Wal Cherry Play of the Year Award and the Sumner Locke Elliot Prize (New York). He has also been awarded, with Ariette Taylor, the Kenneth Myer Medallion for the Performing Arts for his work with the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project. His work has been presented at the Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide International Arts Festivals. Since 2000 over 75 productions of his work have been presented in Europe, predominately in France (including at the Avignon Festival, Théâtre de la Commune in Paris, Scéne Nationale de Toulouse and at Théâtre de la Ville in Paris). Seven volumes of his work (French translations by Severine Magois) have been published by éditions Theatrales, Paris. Over the past three years more than a dozen of his plays have been performed and toured in France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Portugal.
His most recent play, The Serpent's Teeth, commissioned by the Sydney Theatre Company, opened at The Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera house, in April 2008 and was the winner of the 2009 NSW Premier’s Literary Award. Daniel has recently completed Dreamers, for Compagnie Tabula Rasa in Toulouse as well as two short plays to be performed in French High Schools for Compagnie La Federation, Lyon. He is also currently under commission from the Melbourne Theatre Company, The Sydney Theatre Company and One-Year-Lease (New York).
In May 2010 his play Scissors, Paper, Rock will open at Théâtre de La Colline, Paris, before touring nationally. In October 2010 Dreamers will premiere at Scéne Nationale de Toulouse.
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