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.”
Article, Press, Review
Press
VAN Magazine – 1 June 2023
A Chained Man’s Bruise
Madness and empire in “Eight Songs for a Mad King”
Benjamin Poore
“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.”
Press, Review
The New York Times – 24 May 2023
Madness, Royalty and the Music of Screams
Hugh Morris
“Me being onstage as a Black experimental contemporary music vocalist,” Mitchener said, “is in itself a political act.”
Article, Press
The Wire – May 2023
A Cry of Anguish: Eight Songs For A Mad King
David Grundy
“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.”
Article, Press
Das Wetter, Magazin für Text & Musik – April 2023
Jay Bernard -Elaine Mitchener | A conversation
A perspective is a Mesh
Article, Press
Field Notes – March 2023
“The Job Is to Make the Score Live.” Elaine Mitchener on On Being Human as Praxis
Kristoffer Patrick Cornils
“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.
Interview, Press
The Wire – May 2022
Womens Work, Wigmore Hall
Jo Hutton
“The ensemble exit the stage to Alison Knowles’s Shuffle, concluding a powerful evening of profound reflection on women’s influence in the world.”
Review
Evening Standard – 18 January 2022
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.
Article, Press
Royal Academy Magazine – September 2021
Three artists on Dance
‘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).
Interview, Press