We were thrilled to be selected again to take part in Sadler’s Wells’ Elixir Festival 2017 having also performed at the inaugural festival in 2014. We performed ‘This Fleeting Instant’ on the Lilian Baylis stage at Sadler’s Wells, London on June 25^th.

The work was choreographed for Striking Attitudes by Caroline Lamb assisted by rehearsal director, Janet Fieldsend and featured projections of John Piper’s paintings of the mountains of North Wales and included text from the Philosopher Emperor Marcus Aurelius and John Piper.

Our 2017 funding from Gwanwyn helped support the project.

PROGRAMME NOTES

Ancient voices echo in This Fleeting Instant – a work meditating on the permanence of the Welsh mountains, shaped during the last ice age, and the impermanence and transient nature of human life.

MOVEMENT STARTING POINTS 

The forms and shapes of Piper’s graphic images of the Welsh mountains painted in the 1940s/50s. He was fascinated by their visual drama and geology: ‘the bones and structure and lie of the mountains’.

Text from:

Marcus Aurelius – died 180AD– ‘ Remember that man lives only in this fleeting instant’. His wisdom is still pertinent wisdom – Roman mindfulness!

‘Letting go of all else, cling to the following few truths. Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant.

All the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed.

This mortal life is a little thing, lived in a little corner of the earth.’

John Piper –

‘I felt then that I was seeing the mountains for the first time and seeing them as nobody had seen them before.’

‘Mist blowing across – Peak of Snowden out once only. Curious feeling in presence of giant pale boulders, coffin slab and trunk shaped, disappearing at close range into grey invisibility .…….’

‘Lonely closed in sensation induced by the mist; though the rock strewn flat-top becomes more than ever like a friendly cemetery belonging to an enormous untidy race of men.’

PERFORMERS

Kath Dimery, Liz Harris, Geraldine Hurl, Olivia Jones, Karen Le Beau, Alicia Richards, Shirley Stansfield, Linda Sugarman.

REHEARSAL PHOTOS 

CHAPTER STUDIO JUNE 23 2017