Music from Anna Meredith’s Anno for violin, strings, and electronics has been choreographed by Elisabeth Schilling for Florescence in Decay, which opened on 23 March at the Grand Théâtre Luxembourg. Corinna Niemayer conducted the Orchestre de Chambre de Luxembourg, with Meredith herself also performing.
Anno (2016) was commissioned by Scottish Ensemble and Spitalfields Music. It juxtaposes Meredith’s work with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Meredith draws on omitted movements for Vivaldi’s original, whilst also editing and re-naming performance directions in his score. Meredith overlays and surrounds this music with her own original electronic compositions and soundscapes, in an imaginative recontextualization of Vivaldi’s music over 50 minutes. A documentary about Anno’s creation is available to watch here. To date it has been presented been presented across the UK, and in Japan, Holland and the USA.
Schilling’s Florescence in Decay is a new group piece for nine dancers. It is a physical meditation on continuity, repetition, and change. Engaging different layers of time both within and beyond the scale of human experience, the piece explores the rhythms of becoming and passing away, growing and maturing, transience and renewal.
Music from Anno, along with Meredith’s song Heal You, was previously choreographed as part of Katie Mitchell’s lockdown project A New Dark Age for the Royal Opera House in 2020. Breakout hit Nautilus has been choreographed by Calvin Richardson for Scottish Ballet (2019) and by Jessica McCann for Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre. Most recently Meredith’s music featured extensively in Alan Cumming’s solo dance-theatre piece Burn, on the life of Scotland’s national poet (Robert Burns), at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2022, before a Scottish tour and transfer to New York.