Culture Declares Emergency is the all too necessary response by the UK and international arts communities to the escalating climate and ecological crisis. Two remarkable artists central to this growing movement will be in conversation about how their practices can both inform and inspire collective creative and transformational action. Jocelyn Pook will be playing an extract of The Lost Words, "You Need To Listen To Us" - a new work commissioned for the Proms which sets words from speeches by environmental activist Greta Thunberg to music. Along with Heather Ackroyd, Dan Harvey has worked for decades directly with natural world processes to create outstanding and resonant works that question our relationship with the landscape around us.
Jocelyn Pook is one of the UK’s most versatile composers, having written extensively for stage, screen, opera house and concert hall. Often remembered for her film score to Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, which won her a Chicago Film Award and a Golden Globe nomination, she has worked with some of the world’s leading directors, musicians and artists including Martin Scorsese, Peter Gabriel, Massive Attack, Laurie Anderson. Her first opera Ingerland was commissioned by ROH2 for the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio in 2010, and The BBC Proms and The King’s Singers commissioned her to collaborate with Poet Laureate Andrew Motion on a work entitled Mobile. Jocelyn won an Olivier Award for the National Theatre’s production of St Joan, and a British Composer Award for her multi-media music-theatre piece Speaking in Tunes. She won a second British Composer Award for her soundtrack to Akram Khan’s dance production DESH. In 2014 she composed the score for his dance piece Dust choreographed for English National Ballet to mark the centenary of the First World War, as well as the score for Mike Bartlett’s play King Charles III which premiered at Almeida Theatre, London and transferred to West End and Broadway NY. Her most recent ballet for English National Ballet, M-Dao, choreographed by Yabin Wang, premiered in 2016 at Sadler’s Wells. In 2018 Jocelyn won a BAFTA for her score for the 2017 TV film version of King Charles III. She composed the soundtracks for The Wife, acclaimed feature film starring Glenn Close, and for The Staircase, the extraordinary documentary series directed by Jean-Xavier Lestrade. This year Pook was commissioned by The Proms to compose a new piece for Prom 49: in The Lost Words:"You Need To Listen To Us" she sets words from speeches by environmental activist Greta Thunberg to music. She also composed the soundtrack for The Kingmaker, a documentary film about the controversial political career of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, directed by Lauren Greenfield, to be released later this autumn
www.jocelynpook.com
Dan Harvey (b. 1959 England) and collaborator Heather Ackroyd are internationally acclaimed for creating multi-disciplinary works that intersect art, activism, architecture, biology, ecology and history
Referencing memory and time, nature and culture, urban political ecologies, climate breakdown and degradation of the living planet, their time-based practice reveals an intrinsic bias towards process and event. Processes of germination, growth and decay (organic and inorganic), erosion and deposition, feature in artworks that often evolve through extended research in response to people and place, interfacing their profound interest in local ecologies and planetary concerns with socio-political paradigms.
Equally renowned for their monumental architectural interventions, commissions include the ARoS Triennial, Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark; Royal National Theatre, London; Dilston Grove, London, UK; 9th Sculpture Quadrennial, Riga, Latvia; Wellington Festival of Arts, New Zealand; Theaterhaus Gessneralle, Zurich, Switzerland. and they have been recipients of major public art awards including a commission for the inauguration of the David Attenborough Building in Cambridge 2016, History Trees a major public art commission for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London and Beuys’ Acornsis an ongoing research work initiated by the artists in 2007 where they germinated and grew hundreds of oak trees from acorns collected from Joseph Beuys’s seminal artwork “7000 Oaks”.
www.ackroydandharvey.com/