Finding Song Home is a new Bicycle Opera directed by Kaffe Matthews with technical development by Tom Keene and the Bircrophonic Research Institute (BRI), commissioned by La Monnaie and Q-O2.
The opera will open with an interactive sonic bike game in La Monnaie plaza and Molenbeek Square on 9th & 10th May 2015, followed by an audio landscape mapped onto specific streets in Brussels, for a sonic cyclist audience to reveal during May.
The libretto for the opera will be written through a workshop period during Matthews’ residency in Brussels. The sounds and stories of immigrant communities in Brussels will be revealed, documented, rewritten and fictionalised together to create the work.
The sonic bike game will be open to the audience to play, riding up to 20 sonic bikes. Each cyclist will be able to ride through the square, finding fragments of song and sound to make their own opera that will play out through the bike-mounted speakers as they ride. The bikes will also be sensitive to each other, able to alter or steal the sounds of other bikes that get close for example creating located harmonies, dynamic unisons or individual solos, all determined by the cyclist.
Finding Song Home will then become a shifting audio landscape mapped onto specific streets of Brussels, available to experience by sonic bikes ridden throughout May. Individuals or groups will choose their own route through the city – revealing a unique rendition of the opera on each journey.
Eight new sonic bikes will be created for this work and will then remain in Brussels to be developed, maintained and used by others for future projects.
Finding Song Home will not only bring diverse communities together, but it will engender new skills and inspire action for future works.
in coproduction/collaboration with La Monnaie/De Munt, Cyclo, Foam, Huis van de Culturen en Ivan Vrambout, Globaroma.
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