PagetBaker

Entitled Anthem, the performance is a trilogy of short films by Derbyshire, that documents a disappearing landscape. The powerful choral accompaniment encourages the audience to explore the impact man is making on the global environment. Stunning imagery from the Arctic, Newfoundland and the United Kingdom, together with haunting sounds from composer Ulrike Haage's musical score, will be accompanied by the vocal ensemble, Stile Antico.

Anthem uses metaphors of landscape and song to assemble ideas around issues of nationality, identity and language borrowing from sources such as national anthems, ancient land names and etymology. Derbyshire was inspired to make this work in 2001 during a walk along the Scottish/English border. While filming the area, which was engulfed in mist at the time, she was “struck by the idea of blurred borders and nationalities. This was compounded by the fact that the boundary of the British Isles fluctuates with the tide... our borders are useless in the face of the weather crisis.” Derbyshire decided she wanted to make a work about land, place and nation.

 

Derbyshire established that there was a synergy between her line of enquiry and the Cape Farewell creative mission, to work with artists to communicate on an emotional level the urgency of the global climate challenge. She was invited to join the 2007 Cape Farewell expedition to the High Arctic, where she joined a crew of 20 artists and scientists and sailed the 100 year old schooner Noorderlicht, from Svalbard to the east Coast of Greenland, to the north coast of Iceland.

 

Footage from this voyage will be presented for the first time in Anthem at the Eden Project, a platform that helps people to understand environmental and climate change issues that the global community is facing.

 

SELECTED COVERAGE

 

The Independent, 15th November 2009

Culture 24, 30 October 2009

 

VIDEO

 

YouTube