Tzipora by Anna Dennis, Sean Ashton, Richard Scott

Anat Ben-David’s Tzipora is an album and video installation that focuses on the natural world as a site for the projection of human emotion. Drawing on a range of literature, including J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967), the songs propose an emotional intersection between human, animal and vegetable worlds. This is exemplified in ‘Mathilde’s Song’, a pop re-make of Richard Wagner’s ‘Im Treibhaus’ (based on Mathilde Wesendonck’s poem), where the speaker’s feelings of longing and mortality are echoed by plants in a greenhouse ‘stretching their arms out wide’ to ‘hug the barren void’. Harsh analogue synths, crunchy beats and vocals provided by Ben David and her collaborators – which include soprano Anna Dennis on ‘Mathilde’s Song’, ‘More’ and ‘Iridescence’, and poet and countertenor Richard Scott on ‘Overtones’ – create a sound-expression that comes out of a process of improvisation in which sounds, words and people interact to produce unexpected narratives. Catharine Cary features in the video for ‘Iridescence’ and Butoh master Mushimaru Fujieda performs in the video for ‘Overtones’.

Dr Anat Ben-David explores the freedom of live improvisation combined with traditional methods of musical composition. Her background in experimental theatre (the school of Visual Theatre, Jerusalem) and as a member of electro–punk band and art collective Chicks On Speed, has led to projects such as Kairos OperaArt at the V&A in 2017.