MEDIATHEK

What lies in the stars? Fortune, famine, fame, love? Liza Lim invokes the universal mythologies of the stars as the foundation of Atlas of the Sky.
 Through the voice, massed percussion and the elemental power of a mob, the work creates large-scale patterns that counterpoint the turbulent rhythms of our contemporary world.
 
 The work is based on three striking poems. The first is 'The Stars' by Eliot Weinberger, a text which unfolds a rich set of resonances, exploring the tension between the shifting meanings attributed to the stars from one human culture to the next. Lim has also drawn on two poems by contemporary Chinese poet Bei Dao, who connects constellations of the stars with notions of ‘the crowd’; it’s potency and mercurial power. In many ways Atlas of the Sky is a ritual journey across a range of emotions and states connected to crowds, mobs, protest and communion.
 
 These texts are brought to life in Lim’s musical composition - an expressive percussive feat that fuses elements of contemporary opera with the roughly hewn textures of a crowd of trained and untrained performers. The music pushes the rawest elements of sound making to an expressive peak, with each musical gesture packed with an abundance of poetic meaning that extends from the intimate to the cosmic.
 
 The work is divided into 6 sections:
 1. Crowd of the dead
 2. Military crowds (the army, the hunting pack)
 3. Surveillance
 4. Protest
 5. Crowds of the living
 6. Communion between the living and the dead