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Composer Quinta Commissioned to Create a New Contemporary Circus Score

The Exploded Circus is an all-female contemporary circus production with a highly visual narrative that uses the scene of a devastated circus and its performers as an allegory to explore themes around drastic change, belonging and hope. Producing company Mimbre have commissioned Quinta to create the score for the production.

Quinta is a mid-career London-based experimental music-maker and multi-instrumentalist, with particular interests in improvisation, non-conventional scoring, electronic interfacing and new instruments.

The set design for The Exploded Circus is inspired by Cornelia Parker’s installation, Exploded Shed, David Spriggs ‘Half Explosion’ and Ori Gersht ‘Time after time’ photographs and holds an array of beautiful possibilities for the creation of an original soundtrack: sounds will be generated live from the performers’ movement to complement the written score. This will be achieved through using simple audio technology such as Makey Makey and Mogees, techniques that Quinta has developed through her previous work with Rambert dance company and the Collectress collective.

Talking about the project, Quinta said: “[Mimbre and I] discussed how we might engage non-musical performers in the act of creating live music using trigger technologies and ‘non-instruments-as-instruments’. This promised much and The Exploded Circus represents the chance to realize and develop these very new ideas and it would be a great step forward for me creatively to work on it.

“The very theme of the piece, the re-building of life after an enormous explosion, speaks to this idea: the potential for new sounds for the new world being created.”

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