Fay Nicolson

OVER AND OVER PURE FORM is a long form poem activated by gesture and performed to a drum track. The poem describes the curriculum of a phantasy Art School, pasting Modernist studio exercises and Post-Modern reflexivity onto a neurotic atmosphere of contemporary neo-liberal demands. In OVER AND OVER PURE FORM I use prosody, melodrama, humour, and gestural motifs to wrest communication from the literal and rational towards the surreal, associative and sensual. The narrator is a visionary yet sadistic tutor, instructing students into impossible formal and ideological positions. A chorus of willing students take on the forms of the contradictory pedagogical approaches they are subjected to, awkwardly marching to the beat whilst craving for moments of realization, rupture, and resistance.

SPA SONGS is song cycle, originally recorded as a series of demos, and then arranged for seven voices for live performance. The song cycle is a response to Bermondsey, an ex-industrial and former monastic area by the River Thames in London. The work uses polyphony, harmony and dissonance, and lyrics to explore what lies beneath the surface of this changing place. The underground river, which often bursts through the tarmac on Spa Road, is a point of departure for exploring continuity and change. Motifs of flooding and burning, communing and dissolution are touched upon – reflecting on the area’s history as the former site of a Cluniac monastery, docks, warehouses, and artist’s studios. These places have long been razed or repurposed, but SPA SONGS searches for traces of their existence.