Billiards
A collage opera
Produced by Mahogany Opera Group in association with Sound and Music
Alone in his Manhattan research laboratory, Raymond Scott, the father of electronic music, is developing a machine to generate random musical patterns. When one of his devices accidentally tears a hole in the universe, it begins a fantastical space-music-history-sci-fi-gameshow encounter that brings him face to face with classical composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Inspired by Mozart’s love of billiards and Scott’s experiments in electronic sound, follow these extraordinary characters as they debate random chance and creating music, with some help from film-pioneer Georges Méliès, Lewis Carroll’s logic games, and composers John Cage and JS Bach.
Ergo Phizmiz’s high-octane opera-essay combines, video animation, puppetry, live singing, recorded tracks and a remix of classical and electronic music to create an exhilarating sensory event blurring the boundaries between opera and performance art.
Billiards is a bizarre and feisty challenge to traditional preconceptions of opera.
“For first you write a sentence, And then you chop it small; Then mix the bits and sort them out Just as they chance to fall: The order of the phrases makes No difference at all.”
- Lewis Carroll / Ergo Phizmiz Billiards
Images: Ergo Phizmiz, Impact
TICKETS FOR THIS EVENT ARE FREE BUT BOOKING IS ESSENTIAL
14 October 2015, 6.30pm - King's College London - work in progress performance Presented as part of King's College London Arts & Humanities Festival
14 October 2015, 8.30pm - King's College London - work in progress performance Presented as part of King's College London Arts & Humanities Festival
Produced by Mahogany Opera Group in association with Sound and Music
Alone in his Manhattan research laboratory, Raymond Scott, the father of electronic music, is developing a machine to generate random musical patterns. When one of his devices accidentally tears a hole in the universe, it begins a fantastical space-music-history-sci-fi-gameshow encounter that brings him face to face with classical composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Inspired by Mozart’s love of billiards and Scott’s experiments in electronic sound, follow these extraordinary characters as they debate random chance and creating music, with some help from film-pioneer Georges Méliès, Lewis Carroll’s logic games, and composers John Cage and JS Bach.
Ergo Phizmiz’s high-octane opera-essay combines, video animation, puppetry, live singing, recorded tracks and a remix of classical and electronic music to create an exhilarating sensory event blurring the boundaries between opera and performance art.
Billiards is a bizarre and feisty challenge to traditional preconceptions of opera.
“For first you write a sentence, And then you chop it small; Then mix the bits and sort them out Just as they chance to fall: The order of the phrases makes No difference at all.”
- Lewis Carroll / Ergo Phizmiz Billiards
Images: Ergo Phizmiz, Impact
TICKETS FOR THIS EVENT ARE FREE BUT BOOKING IS ESSENTIAL
14 October 2015, 6.30pm - King's College London - work in progress performance Presented as part of King's College London Arts & Humanities Festival
14 October 2015, 8.30pm - King's College London - work in progress performance Presented as part of King's College London Arts & Humanities Festival
