Dear Land

In Dear Land, the International Contemporary Ensemble presents Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) and the World Premiere of Du Yun’s Zolle (2005).

Eight Songs for a Mad King portrays the madness of King George III of England, who was declared permanently insane ten years before his death as a fog of hysteria punctuated by moments of searing clarity. In Du Yun’s Zolle, a dead woman wanders through the shadowy space between memory and reality, tracing the lines of her identity through the land she once walked: an immigrant in death as in life.

Dear Land juxtaposes these two sung monodramas of radically different style, seamlessly combining sound, text, movement and multimedia images in the examination of the mind when torn from the body.