Anna Meredith’s genre-defying music, which spans the worlds of electronica, acoustic, classical and pop, has been taken up enthusiastically by a range of choreographers across the dance and contemporary music world.
On 29 August 2023 Meredith’s Nautilus (2011 arr. 2021), an iconic fanfare for orchestra, appeared as part of Robert Dekkers’ new show Noble Beast for Post:ballet, produced by Art Haus for Burning Man 2023. The performance, conducted by Brad Hogarth, was staged around NOSOTRES by artists Simón Malvaez and Brenden Darby. Reflecting the ANIMALIA theme of last year’s festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, Noble Beast is “a celebration of our personal and collective journey as we continue shedding our egos and rewilding our beings to discover the noble beast within each of us”. In this respect it tunes in to the propulsive rhythms and heroic swagger of Meredith’s 5-minute fanfare.
In 2016 Robert Dekkers and Post:ballet choreographed Meredith’s 12-minute body percussion piece Handsfree (2012), written for the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. The same year Dekkers and Meredith also joined forces with The Living Earth Show to create Tassel (to a commissioned Meredith score). Nautilus has previously been choreographed for The Royal Ballet & London Sinfonietta by Calvin Richardson for the 2019 re-opening of the Linbury Theatre.
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.
Schilling’s Florescence in Decay was 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.
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.
In 2022 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 that year, before a Scottish tour and transfer to New York.