PROGRAMME
Piano Suite IX 'Significantus' (Lola Perrin 2016)
'Snow' (Josephine Dickinson)
Lola will give a short talk and facilitate a longer audience intervention on the National Citizens' Assembly; what is it and how might it help steer our democracy so we respond adequately to the issues driving our climate and ecological crisis?
BIOGRAPHIES LOLA PERRIN is composer, pianist, publisher, collaborator and founder of ClimateKeys. Since 2005 she has increasingly focussed her artistic activities on climate change issues, composing from different perspectives. In ‘Piano Suite IV: Music from Fragile Light Spaces’ (2005), she turned to art, triggered by sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s journey in the Arctic. In ‘Let’s start at the end’ for two pianos she turned to the apocalypse. After this she turned to witnesses of climate change for ‘Now You See It: for piano and an orchestra of words’ (2015), In ‘Piano Suite IX: Significantus (2016), she turned to audiences, asking for conversation about climate change during the performance - leading to her founding the global initiative, ClimateKeys. In 'The Big Invisible Clock” (2018) she explores the timeline we have in which to decarbonise to keep the temperature rise to a safer level.
Born in London, poet JOSEPHINE DICKINSON has been deaf since the age of six as a result of a childhood illness. She studied classics at Oxford University and went on to establish a career as a musician, composer, and poet. In her late 30s she relocated to Alston, a remote English Cumbrian town, where she met and married an elderly sheep farmer, Douglas Dickinson, who died in 2004. Her poems, rich in natural imagery, are sometimes metered or rhymed, but always attentive to sound in their tender evocations of rural life. As New York Times Book Review critic James Longenbach noted in a review of Silence Fell, “Her acute relationship to the physical sensation of language distinguishes these humble, deftly made poems.” In a 2007 interview with the Times (London), Dickinson stated, “I do know that I found speech more difficult than music to cope with after the deafness. I came to see the written word as a liberation, which was wonderful. Very exotic and exciting.” Dickinson’s collections of poetry include Scarberry Hill (2001), The Voice(2004), and Night Journey (2008). Silence Fell (2007) contains a selection of poems from her first two books and is Dickinson’s first American publication, with an introduction by poet Galway Kinnell. Dickinson continues to tend her late husband’s sheep farm.
