The Place

Light Flooding Into Darkened Rooms deals with privacy, with a delicacy of feeling masked by the formal façade of propriety and gracious behaviour. When Denis Gaultier wrote his lute pieces in the 17th century, a music could lesson act as the polite cover for stolen moments of intimacy. The music master’s attentive correction of the pupil’s fingering on an instrument involved close physical contact and sensual touch – all in the name or art and its high ideals. Jo Kondo’s Ars Breview, music inspired by Gaultier’s “broken style”, adds a 20th century tension to this formality – a more overt picture of the undercurrents swirling beneath such a demeanour  of dignity.

First performed by Richard Alston Dance Company at the Gardner Arts Centre, Brighton on 22 October 1997.