Jamila Johnson-Small and Alexandrina Hemsley. Photo: Dimitri Djuric
Jamila Johnson-Small / Alexandrina Hemsley Native Instincts: Psychic Labours 6.0 (2016) (world premiere)
John Cage excerpts from the Song Books (1970)
Frederic Rzewski De Profundis (1994)
Julius Eastman Buddha (1984) (European premiere)
Julius Eastman Evil Nigger (1979)
Performers
Elaine Mitchener (Cage)
Zubin Kanga (director and piano, Eastman)
Rolf Hind, Siwan Rhys, Eliza McCarthy (pianos, Eastman)
Jamila Johnson-Small
Alexandrina Hemsley
Frederic Rzewski
Two further Julius Eastman premieres bookend our second evening: in the context of his ongoing fixation on questions of identity, the mercurial Buddha (1984) suggests a late turn towards the refusal of selfhood altogether; by contrast, the 1979 piece Evil Nigger is among Eastman’s most intensely biographical, crystallising his mature, sardonic style via washes of repeated notes and harmonic tension.
Forced to explain its controversial title before a 1980 performance, Eastman remarked that just as there are '99 names for Allah', there were '52 kinds of nigger'.
Alongside this we present more work by Eastman's friend and collaborator Frederic Rzewski - his setting of Oscar Wilde’s famous letter from Reading jail for a speaking, whistling pianist, De Profundis, performed here by Rzewski himself - and extracts from John Cage’s Song Books, a sprawling 317-page menagerie of musical experimentation.
Eastman was briefly among the most sought-after performers of the Song Books, as part of the S.E.M ensemble, but a notorious 1975 version - in which Eastman used the freedom of the score to perform a homoerotic ‘lecture’ - tested the interpretive limits of the text, infuriating Cage and hastening Eastman’s drift from the contemporary music establishment.
Eastman was much more than just a composer and singer. Some of his first creative acts were choreographic, and corporeality was at the heart of his practice. Reflecting this, we complete the programme with Native Instincts: Psychic Labours 6.0 from Project O, made up of dance duo Jamila Johnson-Small and Alexandrina Hemsley, whose bravura provocations look back to Eastman's brazen protests. The piece forms a series of works that are experiments towards the show Voodoo.
Based in London, Project O use their choreographic practice to make work in various formats to shine a light on the structural workings of racism and misogyny and their impact on bodies.