Prospect Magazine – 14 July 2023
When classical, rock and jazz music all pondered the meaning of England
Philip Clark
“Mitchener inhabited King George’s fracturing identities with an unsettling intensity.”
“Mitchener inhabited King George’s fracturing identities with an unsettling intensity.”
“With one degree of separation, ‘Eight Songs’ records the sound of the injured and dying from a war between colonial powers. Mitchener’s version shows another vector of that violence: the foundational barbarity wreaked by empire on a different set of bodies.”
“Me being onstage as a Black experimental contemporary music vocalist,” Mitchener said, “is in itself a political act.”
“Eight Songs remains an intensely visceral piece with the capacity to shock. More than that, though, it prompts reflection on the treatment of mental health and the fraught legacies of empire, issues which are still very much with us.”
“On Being Human as Praxis” was conceived by Elaine Mitchener. The vocal artist invited five different composers—Jason Yarde, Matana Roberts, Laure M. Hiendl, Tansy Davies, and George E. Lewis—to respond to the work of the Jamaican feminist and cultural theorist Sylvia Winter.
“The ensemble exit the stage to Alison Knowles’s Shuffle, concluding a powerful evening of profound reflection on women’s influence in the world.”
The best dance, opera and classical music to book in London in 2022. From a celebration of the power of the voice to an adaptation of a dystopian novel, the worlds of dance, opera and classical music are looking firmly forward.
‘I approach dance with a musician’s sensibility,’ says vocalist, composer and movement artist Elaine Mitchener, whose work appears in ‘British Art Show 9’, a major group exhibition that takes the temperature of contemporary art every five years (touring nationally until 23 Dec 2022).