PROGRAMME
Lola Perrin: compositions and piano
Josephine Dickinson: spoken word poetry
Hazel Graham will give a talk, with contribution from Roe Baker
Piano The Sea of Names
Poem The Journey to Moss Flats
Piano One Step, strolling
One step, nearly walking
One step, skipping
Poem The Water Bearers
Piano The bridge, the brook
Poem Birchen Twigs Break No Ribs
Piano Across one hundred years
Poem Carbon
Piano Across one hundred years Improvisation
Poem The Spirit of Moss Flats
Piano Canyon Dusk
Poem And yet …
Piano Music from Fragile Light Spaces: Part 1
Poem Snow Bones
Piano Optimism is a political act
(from forthcoming premiere ‘The Big Invisible Clock’)
Talk by Hazel Graham with Roe Baker
Conversation with the audience
Piano Is the party over yet?
(from forthcoming premiere ‘The Big Invisible Clock’)
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.
HAZEL GRAHAM is Chief Executive of climate change charity, Cumbria Action for Sustainability. She was previously a housing association Board Member, leading on reducing emissions while tackling poverty. She is an activist within the One Million Climate Jobs campaign, is co-chair of Climate Jobs Cumbria and recently travelled by train to Spain, with her two young children, to build their climate jobs movement. Hazel has a masters degree in Environmental Sustainability and a decade of experience leading behaviour change projects, developing energy efficiency training programmes and working as a consultant to improve the financial viability of charities in the UK and abroad. She is also part of the local transition movement in Carlisle and was one of the founder members of Sustainable Carlisle.
