Anna Meredith’s Anno for violin, strings, and electronics has been choreographed by Elisabeth Schilling for Florescence in Decay, appearing at CAPE Ettelbruck as part of the choreographer’s residency on 30 March. The production has also toured arts centres in Luxembourg in a workshop format. It first appeared in a truncated form in March 2024 at the Grand Théâtre Luxembourg, with Corinna Niemayer conducting the Orchestre de Chambre de Luxembourg and Meredith herself also performing. It has now been expanded to an hour-long production, incorporating the entirety of Meredith’s piece. Watch an excerpt here.
Florescence in Decay 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. “Everything transforms, metamorphoses abound”, Schilling writes, “…the rock becomes stone, then sand. The wood burns to ashes, from which flowers are reborn.”
Anno (2016) juxtaposes Meredith’s work with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons – watch a documentary about its creation here. Meredith draws on omitted movements for Vivaldi’s original, whilst also editing and re-naming performance directions in his score. Her score overlays and surrounds this music with her own original electronic compositions and soundscapes, in an imaginative recontextualization of Vivaldi’s music over 50 minutes.
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.