Bianca Scout – The Heart of the Anchoress

As I have mentioned in the last blog post, I have just finished a big project with artist Bianca Scout called the Heart of the Anchoress, which is a performance that crosses genres and styles, and just really reflects the process itself as the core of performance.

The performance took place in Purcell Room in South Bank Centre last Sunday the 2nd of October. It was part of the event celebrating 5 years anniversary of the label First Terrain.

This project was the perfect way to kick off my third year, a wake up call for my brain and get my body to warm up physically. It was very demanding in the two weeks of rehearsal, working everyday in the studio building the narrative with the whole team. While I mostly worked on the performance, the music that was made by Bianca was very interesting. It was a mix of noise music and folk music which is very much my cup of tea as well. While the performance is based on the album she made and was meant to be the release show, we didn’t end up using much from the album, but instead we chopped it up and use them as inspirations and skeleton to the performance.

This is a completely new way of working for me and for the team. There is nothing solid that I can describe from words because it is a little bit of everything from opera to dance and even ballet and contemporary dance and musical but also experimental noise music and stand up comedy.

You could listen to the live broadcast of the show on Resonance Extra: https://www.mixcloud.com/resonanceextra/

This experience had been very fun in a way that it reminded me that I actually don’t have to follow any set ways of working, but to just blurp out what I was thinking in the most fragmented ways and then piece them back together through various methods. I think I needed that in my last year of study, to not just expand the style of work I produce, but also open up my process and experiment with ways to reach a certain destination. Even if it is a rather normal format album, how do I compose and construct it? How do I go about the relationships between tracks?