Malene Sheppard Skaervard • THE FUTURE OF PERFORMANCE

A Richer Dust

This piece explores the future of performance as a multi-genre, multi-person collaboration - as unfolding against the wider context of reflection on the future of life on our planet.

A Richer Dust is Malene Sheppard Skaervard’s collaboration with the composer Nigel Clarke, scored for speaker, and a large symphonic wind orchestra, which also has a speaking role. The work cannot be categorised as a drama or symphony: its four sections can be seen as both acts and movements. The work was premiered near Nashville, Tennessee, in 2015, issuing a call for an end to violence in dramatic counterpoint with the NRA conference that was taking place in the city at the same time. Extraordinarily for a work of art whose message is explicitly antiwar, one year after its world premiere in the USA it was played in the Guards Chapel Westminster on Remembrance Day by the band of HM Irish Guards. The performance was augmented by players from the other military bands. Among the performances taking places on both sides of the Atlantic, the most ambitious one was presented by Le Conservatoire de Strasbourg in 2018. Sheppard Skaervard collaborated with the drama, graphic and music departments to produce a multimedia immersive event.

A Richer Dust arose from conversations about who the real victims of conflict and terror were. The piece is dedicated to the future victims of war, in honour of the monument erected to the same by the Pankhursts in East London. It brings together words from a diverse collection of sources, from Barack Obama, mothers of dead soldiers and victims of terror, Jens David Breivik (father of the Norwegian mass-killer), through to texts of interviews conducted by the artist with a veteran CIA operative, the cultural anthropologist Dominique Behague and many others. In 2017 the work was released on the Toccata Classics label (distributed globally by Naxos). The release attracted much critical attention and was featured on BBC Radio 3’s ‘Record Review’. Following this collaboration (which was Sheppard Skaervard’s second with the composer), she wrote Christina’s Garden for a yet more elaborate combination of speakers, singers, instrumentalists and orchestra. This work was premiered in Minnesota in 2018.

War, terrorism, economic inequality and ecologically-driven famine will be part of our future, but so will conversation and collaboration. Malene Sheppard Skaervard believes we might go back to some of the ‘old ways’ to create and communicate. Through this, we might rediscover how to ‘talk’ our way out of conflict. Community organisations (such as the London Filmmakers’ Co-op) will pop up again. We will show and appreciate art in smaller, less commercial venues, with performances mirrored online, outside the control of global markets and monopolies.

Malene Sheppard Skærved is a writer, performer and filmmaker. She is also an author of biographical works on Marlene Dietrich and Hans Christian Andersen, and Lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths.