Continuum

For live piano and pre-recorded track
Duration 8’
Choreography by Andrew McNicol
First Performed at the EM Forster Theatre, Tonbridge, March 2014

One of Ballet Central’s remits is to give exciting new choreographic talents such as Andrew McNicol the opportunity to create new work, and it is always a stimulating challenge for Philip Feeney to compose a new score for their work. McNicol’s concept was for an upstage completely black so that the dancers could enter from the dark and then return seamlessly back.

Musically Feeney creates a toccata-like continuum, half minimalist half baroque, which in the same way as the choreography does, disappears for periods, but with the sense that the momentum continues, as if on the dark side of the moon.

It is scored for strings and piano, with metal percussion, but the contrasting ‘disappeared’ sections, heralded by waves of suspended cymbal like some kind of far-off cosmic storm, feature a guitar and a distant secret soprano voice.