ELISION Ensemble - Cross-artform Events

Cross-artform Events

Beyond its traditional concert-giving activity, a distinguishing aspect of ELISION's work had been the creation of new cross-artform events, combining musical performance with the visual and sonic arts, including new media, but particularly installation art. Examples include Opening of the Mouth (composer Richard Barrett, installation artist Richard Crow; Perth 1997), Sonorous Bodies (composer Liza Lim, video artist Judith Wright; Brisbane 1999 and Berlin 2001), or DARK MATTER (Barrett and Norwegian installation artist Per Inge Bjørlo; Brisbane 2002 and Berlin 2003). These works stem from close collaboration between composer, visual artist, sound artist and musicians, and frequently occur in musically unusual locations (disused power stations, old railway workshops, backstage, galleries), and create a "total art work" aiming to envelop the audience visually as well as sonically.

"ELISION constructs itself not so much as a concert-performing ensemble but as a vehicle for the creation of unique and thought–provoking artistic statements … ELISION projects are ones with which one mentally carries on an argument long after the event. ELISION is a mouth."

"The Welsh composer Richard Barrett entreated an excursion into the black holes of the universe. On stools and benches welded from steel tubes in the Norwegian Per Inge Bjørlo's environment, you had the impression of being in a forest of grabbing arms. Conducted from a spaceship's cockpit, one hears the musicians of the Australian ELISION Ensemble partly shielded behind steel cages."

ELISION's activity in music theatre/opera production, most recently The Navigator (composer Liza Lim, director Barrie Kosky; Brisbane and Melbourne 2008, Moscow and Paris 2009), can be viewed as a continuation of an artistic relationship which began in 1993 with performances of The Oresteia (Melbourne 1993).

Beyond notated music, ELISION has also maintained a strong thread of structured improvisation performance, often within cross-artform events, such as the seven-night long Bar-do'i-thos-grol (The Tibetan Book of the Dead) (composer Liza Lim, installation artist Domenico de Clario; Lismore 1994 and Perth 1995) (described as "one of the most astonishing creations in recent Australian music performance"). The use of improvisation as a creative laboratory to generate sonic understandings, subsequently informing more formal processes, has occurred with composers Richard Barrett and John Rodgers, and recently in What Remains (composer/performers John Butcher and Timothy O'Dwyer; Brisbane 2007).