Join us for Nattsong – a new new multi-sensory stage work in which poet–performer Caroline Bergvall takes an immersive journey into language, refuge and the night.
Fusing words and music, poetry and performance, songwork and electronic projections into a singular, dreamlike and mesmerising whole. Nattsong is both personal and political – at once an immersive performance and, where feasible, a sound installation for multiple languages.
Created and performed by Bergvall with unique contributions from composer Gavin Bryars, soprano Peyee Chen, sound designer Jamie Hamilton, film-maker Andrew Delaney and a brilliant creative team, Nattsong is the final stand-alone part of a searching and singular trilogy around languages and poetries in movement and migration, sung, spoken, recorded, that began with Ragadawn (2016), staged at daybreak in locations as diverse as Marseille and the Isle of Skye, continued with Conference of the Birds (2018), and now closing with this rich nocturnal call, premiering at Turner Contemporary overlooking the sea.
It is a multi-layered show in which words rise, fall, get lost, re-emerge in large waves of sound and image, and take on the weight of new meanings and old complicities as they pass from speaker to listener to elemental landscapes.
Exploring how words live in perpetual migration, Nattsong finds new resonances in ancient tongues, and draws on the nomadic histories and ancient multilingual routes of medieval love poetry, as well as prophetic nordic texts, and represents them against our current political backdrop of divisiveness, isolation and social and environmental imbalance.
Nattsong has been commissioned by Cement Fields for Estuary 2021 and is supported by Arts Council England, Rivers Institute and Prototype Press.