Deryn Rees-Jones, Bnaya Halperin: Bears Nudging at Pleasures in the Dark

I.       Elephant
for voice and electronics

 

II.      Rest
for a resting individual with headphones

 

III.     Consider the Lilies
for five voices

 

This cycle is the fruit of two years of artistic exchange between two artists. It grows out of joint and often errant explorations, as poet and composer make space for each other, reaching for the moments where feelings and memories become sounds and symbols, and emerge in the cracks between the sonic and semantic. In ‘Elephant’ we meet a woman lost in a hospital in search of a mask. Around her a world is breaking: wars rage, and a virus continues to mutate and cause damage. A movement of breath here opens portals, and dreams, to transform the woman into an elephant, into memory itself, into something not quite graspable.

 

‘Rest’ is an invitation for a nap in the safety of a public space. To rest is to pause, it is to give up one’s body to its own measure. Here the listener can choose to listen or to slip into sleep and dreams, to find solace or escape, watched over or alongside benevolent visitors.

 

In the final piece we move to the small miracle of the rare and almost extinct Snowdon Lily, tucked on a Welsh mountainside. A rare bloom, the lily bears witness to environmental change but also testifies to strength and the promise of a future in a turbulent and calamitous world.

 

Experienced together, the cycle asks us to explore the ethics of care through listening. Euphonically, it nudges us to hopefully and usefully re-align ourselves before the world.

 

Deryn Rees-Jones and Bnaya Halperin-Kaddari