Signature 31/30 (2013)

For live piano and pre-recorded track
Duration: 7 minutes
Choreography by Kenneth Tindall
Performed as part of the 2013 annual national Ballet Central Tour.

Philip Feeney was very pleased to be asked to write the music for this short powerful work, choreographed by Kenneth Tindall. Kenny was not only a young choreographer of undoubted talent and a much-loved principal dancer of Northern Ballet, but he is a distinguished alumnus of Ballet Central, having danced in the BC Tour of 2000, where he premiered, amongst other works, Michael Keegan-Dolan’s sparkling anthropomorphic Dog Suite.

Signature 31/30 was choreographed for six dancers, and is characterized by highly inventive shapes and sculpted body-forms occurring more often than not in duet-work.

The music has an intense quality, both in the emptiness of the opening, and the momentum that it later creates. The two most distinctive features of the pre-recorded track are slow cosmic pulse that so strikingly opens the work, and the haunting counter-tenor voice of Angelo Smimmo, that mysteriously chants unknown incantations throughout. The whole of the middle section is a more spacious pas de deux, where the music becomes a little more lyrical, while still retaining a gentle pulsing that maintains the impetus.

Signature 31/30 was performed as part of Ballet Central’s season at the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe, where it was featured in a special ‘Best of the Fringe’ programme.