Electroacoustic dance collaboration with Nick Wales based on O'Regan's Scattered Rhymes.
Unavailable for performance.

  • Electronics, Pre-recorded
  • 30 min

Programme Note

The Genesis of the Score:

The music accompanying Rafael Bonachela’s choreography (referred to here as the Dance Score) started life as a 2006 stand-alone work called Scattered Rhymes by Tarik O’Regan. This 18 minute work in three movements for two choirs was commissioned by the Spitalfields Festival in London. A commercial recording on the Harmonia Mundi label by the Orlando Consort and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir conducted by Paul Hillier was released in 2008. This recording was the catalyst for the Dance Score.

In November 2013 Rafael and Tarik met in New York City, where they discussed the concept for a new dance piece based on Scattered Rhymes. In this new version, which ultimately became the Dance Score, the three existing sections of Scattered Rhymes would be interspersed with three new electronic movements to be composed jointly by composer Nick Wales and Tarik.
Tarik and Nick met in Sydney in March 2013 to work on the electronic movements. Using only samples from the original 2008 CD of Scattered Rhymes and various recordings of people reading poetry, together they created rough mixes of the three newly commissioned electronic sections, which they have titled Fragmented Dimensions. Over the next few months, Nick honed the electronic tracks, working with Tarik and mix engineer Bob Scott, to seamlessly interpolate them into the three original Scattered Rhymes movements.

The end result is the half-hour Dance Score, which is organized in six movements as follows:
1. Fragmented Dimensions I
2. Scattered Rhymes I
3. Fragmented Dimensions II
4. Scattered Rhymes II
5. Fragmented Dimensions III
6. Scattered Rhymes III

Media

Reviews

'It’s a brave man who tackles as rhythmically sophisticated and as texturally dense a work as this in a dance piece, but Rafael Bonachela has never shied away from a musical challenge. Here, he proves himself capable of pretty much anything, in possibly the finest piece of work I’ve seen from him to date. O’Regan and Australian composer Nick Wales have worked a minor miracle by seamlessly fusing the a cappella original with new electronic music that frames, offsets and enhances to create something that they call Dance Score.'
'I frequently found myself writing phrases like: “this is so beautiful” – and it is, again and again'
Clive Paget, Limelight Magazine
8th October 2014
Bonachela’s achieves that sublime experience when music, movement and design coming together in euphoric alchemy: the choreography and the score seem to describe each other perfectly, seem so perfectly enmeshed as an organic whole that it’s hard to imagine one without the other.
A massive tip of the hat goes to composer Tarik O’Regan, whose choral mass ‘Scattered Rhymes’ forms the basis of the score, which was ‘remixed’ in collaboration with local composer Nick Wales (ex Coda). The result is a contrapuntal movement between electronica rave-scapes and 14th century choral music; the sweet spot is an extended sequence in which Bonachela deploys 12 dancers on stage in a choreographic equivalent of the polyphonic aural spree. For an exhilarating moment, it’s as if you were inside the architecture of the music.
Dee Jefferson, Time Out Sydney
8th October 2014