Stage Work

Jocelyn began her career in experimental theatre and dance, both as a performer with Impact Theatre Co-operative and Lumière and Son and then as a composer with DV8 Physical Theatre and O Vertigo Danse.

She has since worked with a number of artists and companies including: Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company, Phoenix Dance Company, Pete Brooks, Bobby Baker, Jane Dudley, Gillian Lacey, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Wayne MacGregor (for his BBC2 short film, Horizone).

In 2003 she received a British Composer Award (Multi-Media) for the music-theatre piece Speaking in Tunes, a collaboration with visual artist Dragan Aleksic and director Graeme Miller. In 2008 Jocelyn received a further accolade, winning an Olivier Award (Best Music and Sound Design) for the critically acclaimed National Theatre production of St Joan, starring Anne-Marie Duff.

Jocelyn composed the score for this new play by Mike Bartlett, exploring the people beneath the crowns, the unwritten rules of our democracy, and the conscience of Britain’s most famous family.

The Queen is dead: after a lifetime of waiting, the prince ascends the throne. A future of power. But how to rule?

Jocelyn created the score for a new dance piece choreographed by Akram Khan for English National Ballet marking the centenary of the First World War. Her source material includes an archive recording of Edward Dwyer, a corporal in the British army. In 1916, Dwyer was recorded talking about his life as a soldier and singing a marching song, ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here,’ invented by soldiers. He was killed in action later that year, making the scratchy archive recording even more poignant. In Jocelyn’s piece, the voice of counter-tenor Jonathan Peter Kenny acts as a counterpoint to the recording of Dwyer singing. Her works will be performed by the English National Ballet orchestra.

Lest We Forget included commissions by award-winning British contemporary choreographers Akram Khan, Russell Maliphant and up-and-coming classical ballet choreographer Liam Scarlett reflecting the moving and powerful impact of the First World War on those setting off to fight and those left behind.

Following the success of their award-winning collaboration DESH, Jocelyn worked with Akram Khan again for a new production, iTMOi (in the mind of igor). Jocelyn Pook and fellow composers Nitin Sawhney and Ben Frost created an original score to commemorate the centenary of Igor Stravinsky’s seminal ballet The Rite of Spring, which was performed exactly 100 years after the original, riotous premiere in Paris.

The Rite of Spring caused uproar when it opened at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913, due to the avant-garde nature of Stravinsky’s music, Vaslav Nijinsky’s anarchic choreography and Nicholas Roerich’s vibrant costumes and stage designs. The work depicts a pagan ritual – an imaginary ancient tribe sacrifices a young virgin to appease the god of spring, by forcing her to dance herself to death.

iTMOi forms part of a Stravinsky-led trilogy of works at Sadler’s Wells entitled A String of Rites. The piece received its world premiere at MC2: Grenoble in France, where Khan is an Associate Artist in a special co-operation with Sadler’s Wells.

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In 2011, Jocelyn collaborated with Akram Khan on his new project, DESH (homeland), creating a “musical score that surprises at every turn, mixing found material from field trips in Bangladesh with lyrical chants and hymns” (Luke Jennings, The Observer).

“We began in the capital, Dhaka, a place full to bursting with vividness of life and colour. All around there were teetering piles of freight pushed on bicycles, tangles of wires overhead and a loud soundtrack to all this chaos and hustle and bustle of human toil: bells and hoots, car horns, ship sirens, clanks and clashes of metal in the shipyard; then in quieter moments, the sound of children singing, and the gentle squealing of hungry river otters.”

This is a visceral and evocative collection that moves from fragile, intimate works to large scale orchestral pieces, lifting rhythms from the urban chaos captured in Jocelyn’s field recordings. Featuring the singers Melanie Pappenheim, Sohini Alam, Natacha Atlas and Tanja Tzaragoza, the work includes Jocelyn’s piece, Hallelujah, described by one critic as “so beautiful it could break your heart” (The Times).

This album of the soundtrack to DESH, composed by Jocelyn, is available to buy through jocelynpook.com – click the PayPal button below to reserve your copy.

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TRACKS

01 Hallelujah
02 Metallic Sonata
03 Honey Bee Story
04 Remembering Noor
05 Teenage Years
06 Ave Maria
07 Ami Opar
08 Bleeding Soles
09 Storm Engine

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CREDITS

DESH is a new full-length contemporary solo and the most personal work to date from celebrated choreographer and performer, Akram Khan. DESH meaning ‘homeland’ in Bengali, draws multiple tales of land, nation, resistance and convergence into the body and voice of one man trying to find his balance in an unstable world. www.akramkhancompany.net

Featuring singers Melanie Pappenheim, Sohini Alam, Natacha Atlas, Labik Kamal, Jeremy Schonfield, Tanja Tzarovska, Jocelyn Pook
Viola violin piano Jocelyn Pook
Cello Sophie Harris
Dotara Labik Kamal

Bulgarian orchestra recorded at Graffitti Studio, Sofia
Score preparation Jon Opstad and Ayanna Witter-Johnson

All music composed and arranged by Jocelyn Pook except:
07 Ami Opar Hoye by Lalon Shah arr. Jocelyn Pook
06 Ave Maria composed by Jocelyn Pook/Natacha Atlas

Music produced by Jocelyn Pook and Steve Parr
Recorded and mixed by Steve Parr

Jocelyn composed a sound-score for Out of Water.

The singers are out of breath
The swimmers are out of their depth

At Holkham Beach in Norfolk the sea glistens mirage-like in the distance. In the early morning light a group of singers and swimmers strike out towards the water’s edge until they span the wide expanse of beach. They each look towards the sea, eyes intent, focused on the horizon, searching for something. Is somebody lost at sea?

Created by Helen Paris and Caroline Wright. Stories of endeavour, of swimming, of sinking, interweave with haunting music, lifeguard drills, calls for help and struggles for breath.

Out of Water was part of the London 2012 Festival. It can next be seen on Portobello Beach, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, from 8-10 August 2014.
www.artsadmin.co.uk

Hysteria: A Song Cycle for Singer and Psychiatrist is the third part to a trilogy exploring manifestations of mental health, and was born out of an absorption with the power of the mind, and its interplay with the body. Less talked about and acknowledged, though undeniably still prevalent, is psychosomatic phenomena, which, taking its roots in Freudian analytical theory and case studies, is often overly used to refer to the experiences of ‘hysterical women’.

From a series of interviews with individuals explaining their personal experience of psychosomatic phenomena, or ‘unexplained physiological happenings’, Pook has created a series of movements interspersing observations of psychiatrist Dr Stéphanie Courtade with the ‘patients’ own stories – the music and lyricism of narrative, emotion and recall generates an evocative immersive picture of what it’s like to live with psychological distress, breaking through to the corporeal self.

The performance included video accompaniment by Dragan Aleksić and Georgia Anderson (excerpts contained in the video below) and was followed by a Q&A with Errol Francis, artistic director of PS/Y, Jocelyn Pook, Dr Stéphanie Courtade and Lamis Mary Bayar, chair of mental health organisation Dragon Cafe in London.

The project was kindly supported by The Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England.

Anxiety Fanfare and Variations for Voices is a musical exploration of anxiety disorders, which are amongst the most common of mental health problems.

Pook took inspiration from conversations with people who suffer from anxiety, in all its many forms, and was particularly interested in the experience of living with anxiety on an everyday basis. This selection of new pieces includes first person descriptions of possible causes of anxiety, including the nervous energy of a singer waiting in the wings to go on stage, and some of its many possible effects – hyperventilation, a rush of adrenaline and indecision. They also address the circular nature of living with anxiety on a daily basis, and the busy mind of an insomniac lying awake at night.

Aurora Orchestra conducted by Graham Ross; soloists: Lore Lixenberg mezzo-soprano, Melanie Pappenheim mezzo-soprano, Jonathan Peter Kenny countertenor, George Ikediashibass, and the Mind and Soul Choir led by Lea Cornthwaite.

View this concert on the BBC site

Jocelyn was commissioned by the Jewish Music Institute to create a new musical work. Drawing Life is inspired by poems and drawings from the book ‘I Never Saw Another Butterfly’, created by child inmates held in Terezin concentration camp by the Nazis. Jocelyn will work closely with dramaturge Emma Bernard to create a staged musical piece, an emotionally moving and educational addition to the creative canon of works reminding us of the destructive potential of man’s inhumanity to man.

The production will feature two vocal soloists – Melanie Pappenheim and Lorin Sklamberg (lead-singer of the Grammy-winning New York group The Klezmatics) – alongside Sophie Solomon (violin), Laura Moody (cello), Kate Shortt (cello), Susi Evans (clarinet) and Ian Watson (accordian). It will also use projected video, created by Serbian visual artist Dragan Aleksic, combining children’s drawings juxtaposed with survivor interviews, archive photographs and Nazi propaganda films made inside the camp.

Jocelyn Pook: “When asked to make a piece inspired by the poems and drawings of Terezin’s children, I accepted without hesitation. I had seen some of these works in the Jewish Museum in Prague several years ago, and it had a profound effect on me. What shines through in these works, and also in many survivors’ testimonies, is the capacity in people to find hope and beauty in the direst and bleakest of circumstances and the inventive, creative ways of doing this. I was also touched to read of countless individual acts of kindness and bravery from all sides. This piece will, I hope, be reflective without being devoid of light. It is about the human ability to find ways to nourish the spirit even in the harshest conditions. It is about the positive impact of creativity against all the odds.”

The first preview of Drawing Life took place at Jewish Book Week on 22 February 2014.
Kings Place, 90 York Way London, Greater London N1 9AG
www.jmi.org.uk

Jocelyn Pook’s new work for the Brodsky Quartet and mezzo-soprano Loré Lixenberg was commissioned as part of the City of London Festival (23 June – 26 July 2013). The song-cycle is themed around places with walls, linking Derry~Londonderry, the City of London, Utrecht, Berlin, Vienna, Dubrovnik, Nicosia and Jerusalem in creative reconciliation. Overall, the piece aims to reflect the transcendence of and growth beyond such barriers that divide people.

Pook is among the eight composers who’ve contributed to the work, in partnership with local poets or using earlier texts. Pook’s libretto was specially written by Richard Thomas (well-known for writing Jerry Springer: The Opera and Anna Nicole). A theme running through the texts is trees – symbolic of life, freedom, environment, building and peace. The songs were brought together in an interlocking suite of musical material, composed by Nigel Osborne, creating a coherent journey between the styles and characters of the songs and cities.

www.colf.org

Jocelyn collaborated with singer Melanie Pappenheim and director Emma Bernard on a new piece for H7STERIA with the BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Charles Hazlewood. Hearing Voices is inspired by Jocelyn’s great aunt, Phyllis Williams, who spent much of her life in an asylum struggling to make sense of the voices she heard and writing her experiences in a series of diaries and notebooks. 

Hearing Voices uses the testimony of five women across different generations who have all been diagnosed with a mental illness. Melanie Pappenheim will duet live with these women’s words, protests and laughter drawn from a mixture of recorded testimony and written texts. Hearing Voices uses the words of artists Bobby Baker and Julie McNamara, Jocelyn’s relatives Phyllis Williams and Mary Pook, and the seamstress Agnes Richter — who stitched cryptic texts into a jacket she wore in German asylum, at the turn of the last century. 

Hearing Voices was performed at Queen Elizabeth Hall and broadcast live on BBC Radio 3.

www.bbc.co.uk

Jocelyn was one of eleven of Britain’s renowned film composers commissioned to write music for the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant in honour of the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II.

Jocelyn created a new movement using Handel’s Water Music for inspiration. The suite of music was performed for the first time on 3 June 2012 by an ensemble of live musicians on musical barges carrying choirs and orchestras, part of a pageant of 670 military, commercial and pleasure boats on the river Thames.

Ingerland Jocelyn Pook / ROH2
In June 2010, Ingerland, Jocelyn’s first opera premiered at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio. Ingerland is a big, raw, energetic exploration of the world of the football crowd. Directed by Tony Guilfoyle, with evocative video imagery by Dragan Aleksic, the cast includes Tannishtha Chatterjee, Mike Henry, Jonathan Williams, Olivia Chaney, Mikhail Karikis, Melanie Pappenheim, George Ikediashi, and Lore Lixenberg. Ingerland was commissioned and produced by ROH2 as part of a triple programme of short contemporary operas written by artists with established reputations in non-operatic fields.

www.roh.org.uk
Click here for more images

Jocelyn received a British Composer Award (Multi-Media) for the music-theatre piece Speaking in Tunes, a collaboration with visual artist Dragan Aleksic and director Graeme Miller. Speaking in Tunes was a quartet for four women. It was inspired by everyday sounds that were woven into the music in a journey driven by the quartet’s thoughts, memories and dreams. Film landscapes were mixed with fragments of interviews about music, performing and the course of life. Falling carpets, junk shop violins, stories, a collage of notes, movement and shadows, portraits of the musicians all feature in a performance crossing theatre, music and visual art.

Natacha Atlas
Adam's Lullaby
MANTRA

Peter Gabriel - Low Light, The Time of the Turning,
The Weaver's Reel, Downside Up,
The Nest that Sailed the Sky
Real World Records RWPGO1

Waltz in Black,Valley of the Birds, Daddy's Riding the Range, Golden Brown, No More Heroes
Eagle Records