+Fire+Ice+

an audiovisual collaboration bridging composition and improvisation

We do not lack communication.  On the contrary, we have too much of it.  We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.

                                                                                                                                       (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, What is philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchill. NY: Colombia University Press, p 108)

+Fire+Ice+  is a collaboration between Leona and musician Siôn Dafydd Dawson bridging composition and improvisation, using original spoken word, improvised electric guitar and found internet images, a performance in which the three strands maintain their own speeds and independence whilst affecting each other.

Referencing the centuries-old oral tradition of passing on histories and stories, often to the accompaniment of musical instruments, the work could be understood as a response to 2020 and its months of enforced inertia for the performing arts - not forgetting live arts in the UK and further afield were already under serious threat before Covid 19 came to the forefront.  In creating this piece Leona and Siôn found themselves wanting to ‘sound out loud’ some of their personal experiences as practitioners in the performing arts, as well as thinking about the wider theme of suppression of expression of any sort.  The energy required to overcome setbacks and situations is part of the necessary toolkit for any professional artist, and that energy is also required to question. 

Siôn and Leona have worked together many times over several years, and their collaborations are based on equality.  Written text and improvised sound are considered a partnership on an equal basis, each supporting and informing the other, coming into existence and then dying down, mirroring the flickering, flaring and extinguishing of internal creative passions.  Every event/performance that displays the energy of creation is a fight against the homogenised, the controlled and the commodified - a resistance to the present.

+Fire+Ice+ came into being because of the cancellation of The Shining Pyramid symposium (see in(ex)teriors page).  Curator Dafydd Roberts organised Ysbrydnos::Hallowmas as a response to the cancellation, using the ‘live’ internet stream to launch the limited edition cassette containing the music/sound responding to Welsh occult writing which should have been the basis of the symposium. 

Along with those of the other contributors, Siôn and Leona’s streamed set at Ysbrydnos::Hallowmas has been archived on the British Music Collection which can be accessed through the link.