Cosmic Time
2021
Durational performance with prepared instruments: 40 minutes
Lead artist: Michaela Gleave
Composer: Amanda Cole
Musical director: Louise Devenish
Performers: The Sound Collectors Lab
Louise Devenish
Kaylie Melville
Nat Grant
Hamish Upton
Costume designer: Katy B. Plummer
Costume assistant: Nicole Barakat
Astronomical coding: Michael Fitzgerald
Creative coding: Warren Armstrong
Performance Photography: Zan Wimberley
Video documentation: Angus Kemp
Cosmic time premiered as a percussion quartet at the TarraWarra Museum of Art on 24 April 2021, as part of the exhibition TarraWarra Biennial 2021: Slow Moving Waters.
Program notes are available here
COSMIC TIME is a major new performance work by artist Michaela Gleave, composer Amanda Cole and percussionist Louise Devenish. The project considers time on a cosmological scale, inviting audiences on a guided journey into the depths of existence.
Decentralising hierarchies of knowledge, the project explores alternate forms of understanding, including cosmological, geological, biological, historical and cultural. Created during a residency at the Powerhouse Museum, COSMIC TIME is informed by historic scientific and musical concepts such as orbital resonance and harmonic sequencing, and involves alternate, opposing, and intersecting rhythmic and metric schemas, skirting the peripheries of art, science, music and esotericism.
A sequence of overlapping musical scores, based on various concepts of time, are performed by a cast of musicians dressed as spirits from the multi-verse. Playing metallic percussion instruments, the performers evoke sensations and rhythms scaling from the fall-out of the big bang; the endless circling of planetary forms; the fluttering heartbeats of desert mice; and the dissolve of consciousness into the astral plane.
Comprised of overlapping fields and influences COSMIC TIME is an awe-inspiring audience experience across multiple possible planes. It comprised the following eight overlapping movements: Big Bang, Cosmic Soup, Galactic, Stellar, Planetary, Chemical, Biological and Esoteric.
This project was supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.
The creation of this work was supported by a residency at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.
Dr Louise Devenish is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE200100555) funded by the Australian Government.
With thanks to Monash University.
