Orchestral Theatre: Interdisciplinary Performance Experimentation by Contemporary British Music Ensembles
Members of Scottish Ensemble and Andersson Dance perform in Goldberg Variations: Ternary Patterns for Insomnia. Photo: Hugh Carswell
Adrian Curtin
In recent years orchestras have become more theatrically ambitious. They have begun to depart from the standard concert format, rituals, and mode of presentation, inherited from the later nineteenth century, and re-think how concerts are programmed and presented, how musicians perform, where performance can occur, and the role of the audience in the co-creation of the live event. Orchestras exploring these performance possibilities often collaborate with artists from other disciplines, including theatre, dance, film, and visual art, in the creation of generically hybrid work that challenges conventional understanding of the orchestra, of musicians’ skills and capabilities, of borders between art forms, and of orchestral repertoire.
