Moonwork
Moonwork is a concert performed after dark, in light that belongs to the music. The hall goes to black; over the next hour the ensemble's own lighting rises and wanes on the cycle written into Mara Voss's Selenography, and the house lights return only for the bow.
The season's artwork was shot on a dried lakebed at night — cracked ground that reads as lunar surface, and instruments carrying the green shoots of everything that grows while nobody is watching. Which is, more or less, the programme note.
Touring the dark
Moonwork travels light: the staging is a lighting rig, a memorised programme and one hour of uninterrupted attention, and it has been rebuilt in a festival barn, a former rope factory and a working nightclub. The production pack below has the technical detail; the honest requirement is a room that can be made completely dark.
Programmes vary by hall — Selenography is always the spine, with the Deme Nocturnes, Night Soil or movements of Eight Rooms around it.
“That rare staged concert where the staging is an argument about the music rather than an apology for it.”
Ostinato Quarterly