At a Safe Distance

Event information

Music Theatre collaborators Natacha Diels, Ellie Westbrook and James Oldham bring new music, gesture, humour and a general revelling in the mundane with their UK & Ireland tour “At a Safe Distance”. Each gig on the tour will be shared with different wonderful guest artists.

We are joined on this London evening by Laurence Crane and James Creed! They will perform some works of Laurence Crane (Bobby J and Single Harmony for Rhodri Davies) alongside some of Laurence’s solo piano pieces arranged for guitar by James. They will also perform the semi-theatrical piece Some Rock Music for Alan Thomas and screen some of Laurence’s short film clips.

Ellie and James return to a piece of theirs from 2019, which was originally created for Syrup Tracing; or on the significance of rising and/or falling by Waste Paper Opera. Following two “humans” as they depart from their pedestrian lives to go to the moon. Using found sound, patchworked movement sequences, unexpected rhythms and fragmented song they build a strange and uncanny performative universe.

Natacha presents a new set called Am I Alive, for theremin-driven snare drum, dismembered metronomes, and perpetually accumulating nonsense phrases that gradually coalesce into crystalline sense. Half-remembered conversations with machine friends form the work’s text, constructing elaborate stories built of the forever narrowing gap between life and function. The piece flickers between intimacy and circuitry, drone and chaos, beauty and dissonance.