8 May- world premiere ‘LIFE LINES: A Song Cycle of Dorothy Porter’ with Paul Grabowsky at Melbourne Writers Festival, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Australia
Date: May 8. 2028
Time: 630pm-8pm
Venue: Melbourne Writers Festival, State Library of Victoria
MWF presents a world premiere performance of a song cycle highlighting the interplay between words and music, based on the writing of celebrated Australian poet Dorothy Porter.
Life Lines is a compendium of works written by Dorothy Porter in the last five years of her life. It draws on poems from her last book The Bee Hut, together with previously uncollected late poems.
The project is created by New York-Australian interdisciplinary artist, performer, vocalist, and composer Sophia Brous, as part of a longer-term series Set Pieces. The series explores the setting of words to music alongside the compositional framework of improvisation. In Set Pieces, Brous creates an evolving song cycle in real-time, working from an alchemical dialogue with collaborating musicians.
At this event, Brous will be joined by acclaimed Australian pianist and composer Paul Grabowsky AO. The pair will work with a libretto created especially for this performance by Brous with Yale University Press Senior Editor Jessie Kindig, to create a sublime song cycle using Porter’s poetry.
The performance will be introduced by Porter’s partner, the novelist Andrea Goldsmith, who will speak about the poet, her poetry, and the music that inspired it.
In partnership with State Library Victoria