is a performance work on migration across time and space
with bilingual poetry, preserving a flower-garden as music
inscribed in the air
in collaboration with Landless
It is an incantation, a ritual, which invokes the past, preserves the present and ultimately points to the future. It questions ways to maintain a garden as an heirloom, and how poetry can migrate across time and space. It reincarnates the Korean ancient poetry/song form of Hyangga (meaning 'home song') that died out over a millennium ago, and experiments with its era-specific, bilingual writing system adapted into English. The work takes the blossoming calendar from a faraway garden as a musical score, telling the story of an elderly woman who sings to her flowers in her garden about the ephemerality of everything and human desire to be remembered. It also stands for a possible fusion of the individual musical and cultural practices of Landless and Lee, which seem rather different on the surface. It was nominated for an Ivor Novello Composers Award 2024.
Performance History
- Lawrence Street Workshops / April 2024
- St. Patrick's Day Celebration Mussenden Temple / March 2024
- IMBOLC International Arts Festival, Cultúrlann Uí Chanáin / January 2024
- Residency and Preview Performance, Rathmullan Music Project / July 2023
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