MEDIATHEK

GOTHIC is an interdisciplinary work that explores expressions of gothic from ancient to contemporary times, through word, image and music. European, American and Australian gothic narratives play out in an elegant contemporary song cycle presentation, framed by three large ‘floating’ gothic windows. Across these, a dynamic visual scenography merges Australian and European landscapes, together with historic and contemporary graphics. Andrée Greenwell firmly places her score at the centre of the performance as a ‘theatre of music’, while the diverse artistic elements combine in this essentialist production format to reveal ‘a poetic of the gothic’, and this in contrast to hyper-real expressions of the gothic in contemporary screen culture.

Greenwell’s score is for two vocalists, string quartet, and electric guitar/electronics/sound design, across which she inventively merges folk, postminimalist, post-punk and contemporary classical styles. She collaborates on a cinematic/electro sound design with music producer and electric guitarist, David Trumpmanis. The score of diverse sources is variously complemented and counterpointed by the evocative motion-graphics of London-based artist, Michaela French.

Andrée has scored ‘Annabel Lee’ and ‘The Bells’ by Edgar Allan Poe, alongside new songs to lyrics by Australian writers: ‘The Birds’ (Hilary Bell) after Du Maurier’s short story; a ‘Totentanz’ (Felicity Plunkett) inspired by the German medieval frescoes; ‘Orpheus Song’ (Alison Croggon); ‘Death at the Beach Motel’ (Hugo Race, founding member of The Bad Seeds with Nick Cave) about the heroin overdose of Australian painter Brett Whitely; and Maryanne Lynch has worked with Andrée on ‘Chosen’, concerning the detainment of Austrian Kirsten Fritzl by her grandfather, with her mother and siblings

Additionally, covers of songs that express ideas of ‘gothic’ across history dynamically juxtapose Greenwell’s originals: Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, the German medieval hymn ‘Maria durch ein’ dornwald ging’, Schubert’s ‘Erlking’, the Cure’s ‘A Forest’, Rod Temperton’s ‘Thriller’, famously recorded by Michael Jackson, and Angelo Badalamenti’s theme ‘Falling’ from the television series 'Twin Peaks'.

All this is linked, and at times undercut, by the sound design, including an inventive integration of the Joplin tornado Missouri, captured on iPad in 2012. A rich music theatre journey of word, image and music, takes place across the concert presentation.