The Wapping Project, the east London gallery, restaurant and performance space founded by the inimitable theatre director Jules Wright, is to host CHORUS, an immersive kinetic experience light and sound installation by United Visual Artists from 15 June until 18th July 2010.
Chorus invites us through its hypnotic rhythms to focus our senses and to dissect the sources of the score and the movements within.
Installed in the Wapping Projects Boiler House, a dark and cavernous industrial space, Chorus is simultaneously an intensely physical and yet ephemeral experience consisting of an array of motor-assisted pendulums, suspended from the roof of the Boiler House.
Mounted on each of the pendulums are a light and a speaker. Together these pendulums form single instrument that explores the relationship between performance, sculpture and installation.
Chorus was originally commissioned in March 2009 by Opera North to celebrate the reopening of the Howard Assembly Rooms in Leeds and The Wapping Project installation marks the works debut in the south of England. Chorus is effectively a musical instrument on a grand scale; an instrument in which the special location of each sound is a critical part of the composition.
Each light pendulum emits its own unique musical score, an individual voice in the darkness that together forms a perfect ensemble of light and sound. Conceived by the British collective United Visual Artists, whose current work spans permanent architectural installation, live performance and responsive installation,
Chorus has been reworked to provide a provocative new experience within The Wapping Project.
The musical composition that sits at the heart of Chorus is composed by Mira Calix, and is structured in three distinct phases. Working with an array of recordings of musicians and singers, Calix has generated an abstracted composition that exists both as a series of individual sounds and as a flowing musical composition. This composition resonates throughout the dark Boiler House space punctuated by the choreographed pendulums of light.
Matt Clark creative director at United Visual Artists says of the installation:
Chorus invites us through its hypnotic rhythms to focus our senses and to dissect the sources of the score and the movements within.â€
Jules Wright, the inimitable founder of The Wapping Project adds:
The moment I saw Chorus I knew that it had to be staged at The Wapping Project. The atmospheric chamber of the Boiler Room brings a fresh perspective to this momentous work. Chorus offers a suspension of standard time, replacing it with a mesmerising moment measured by the haunting swing of the pendulum.â€
The Wapping Project is a short walk from Wapping Over ground on the newly opened East London Line from Dalston to New cross with up to eight trains every hour [...view full details]
Chorus at Durham:
