L'Astronome
Choreography; Claire Hancock
Music: Vincent Calianno
Premiere: 2024
L’Astronome is a large-scale stage work combining movement, music, dance, cinema, and sound.
The work is an opera only in name, literally meaning ‘work’. It is a collection of nine tableaux with seven films interpolated between. As of 2024, only three tableaux and two films have been written and performed; a blueprint of more to come.
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These three monolithic constructions, representing the beginning, middle and end of the opera, abstractly explore our cosmological beginnings—our shared spiritual and scientific origin.
Many origin stories point to a great expanse of water—the abyss—that becomes disturbed when a spark, a form, an idea creates the first primordial things. From this event, sometimes described as the emergence of a silver egg, a mound, or a dome that covers the waters, our first gods and our first stars are born.
The primordial spirits and events that emerge from the waters of the abyss during these moments violently expand, birthing and dying, generation upon generation. The abyss, however, always remains waiting to consume our creation again.
The opera explores creation and death, memory and forgetfulness, solitude and visitation, the future and the past.
A Painted Devil
Choreography: Claire Hancock
Music: Vincent Calianno
Premiere: 20 September 2018
Virginia, 1864.
Set in the Confederate South as the American Civil War rages, a young ladies school has been sheltered from the outside world. Until a wounded Union soldier is discovered by one of the young girls. Taken in to convalesce, the soldier is pulled into the jealousies and rivalries within the schoolhouse. Danger ensues…
Umbel
Movement & Performance: Claire Hancock
Music: Vincent Calianno
Premiere: December 2020
Umbel examines the interplay between shadow, light, and the body within space. Movement and music works with shadow as a means to multiply images — as if reflecting on the past, imagining the future; a kind of duality — and as the title suggests — emanating from a common, ghost-like point.