Friday 8 April 2011

Pianist and composer Lola Perrin: Seven Fridays performance project


Lola Perrin photographed by Nazarin Montag

Lola’s Perrin’s Seven Fridays is a new concert series that begins on Friday April 8th at 6.30pm at the Saint Mary Madgalene church, Munster Square, London NW1 3PL. Perrin will be performing her piano suites - on a beautiful Bosendorfer - at this venue one Friday per month from April to October. Each concert is introduced by a guest speaker who is invited to give a short talk inspired by the triggers Perrin used to write the suites: everything from science and cities to contemporary art, fashion, photography and painting. Each concert also marks the launch of the piano suite manuscript books.

To kick the series off, on Friday 8th April Perrin will be playing Suite I, Early One Sunday Morning, (after a painting by Edward Hopper) and Suite II, Nine Images for Piano (inspired by Ansel Adams photographs). The concert will be introduced by John Bryson, photographer and co-founder of Bicha Gallery.

Tickets are available on entrance for £6 (£3 concessions). Phone 020 7935 8682 for more details.

Seven Fridays will be happening on Friday April 8, Friday May 6, Friday June 3, Friday July 8, Friday Aug 5, Friday Sept 16, Friday Oct 14 and guest speakers will be John Bryson, Marcia Teusink, Nazarin Montag, Dr Alida Gersie, Dr Martin Coath, Antonio Capelao and Sue Hubbard respectively. Visuals will accompany some performances.

Lola’s music has drawn comparisons with the music of Ravel, Debussy, Satie, Keith Jarrett, Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Michael Nyman. Seven Fridays marks the release this year of Lola Perrin sheet music by Spartan Press and comes on the heels of Lola’s highly acclaimed shows at BFI Southbank and Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall. Said the BBC:
Lola Perrin's inspirations seem to lie somewhere between the ecstasies of Keith Jarrett's early 70s solo improvisations and the delicate proto-minimalism of Cage's "In a Landscape": even Philip Glass' solo piano works come to mind.

Brief biographies of the other guest speakers can be found below:

Marcia Teusink is an London-based visual artist whose paintings, drawings, and photographic images investigate everyday objects and impermanence. Marcia has also been teaching art to children and adults for over twenty years, in the USA, Switzerland, Italy, and now the UK. She completed her MFA in Visual Arts at the City University of New York at Queens College and is currently doing post-graduate studies in Museum & Gallery Education at the Institute of Education in London.

Nazarin Montag’s work is concerned with exploring the ‘surface’ of digital media. Working with photographic images and employing a painstaking process of cutting and re-constructing a surface, new works are created that provide an illusion of depth and density that were perhaps absent in the original image. Her work offers an imaginary development of the still image; “In an age of advanced technology it has become a normal part of everyday life to interact with the virtual world, where the boundaries between reality and fantasy are blurred.”

Dr Alida Gersie is a dramatherapist/supervisor, workshop-leader and organisational consultant in private practice. Since the 1970s she has specialised in the uses of story to facilitate beneficial change in distressed individuals, institutions and communities. She held a directorship at the Postgraduate Arts Therapies Programme at the University of Hertfordshire until 2000. Her research and writings focus on change-oriented story-work. Throughout her work the principles of sustainability have been of important concern. She is the author of acclaimed and translated books, including Storymaking in Education and Therapy (with Nancy King), Storymaking in Bereavement, Reflections on Therapeutic Storymaking: the use of stories in groups and Earthtales, storytelling in times of change.

Dr Martin Coath builds computer models that reflect the way our senses adapt to the environment in which we find ourselves. The aim is to understand how we acquire the tools to make sense of the world through our experience of it, which involves examining what is meant by learning, even down to the changes that occur at the gaps (synapses) between pairs of neurons. We build our internal world using just hints from our external world, fleshed out with what is embodied in our experience. These two unequal streams combine in patterns of events, flashes of synaptic activity, which are the raw material from which our percepts are constructed.

Antonio Capelao, DipArch RIBA II, is of Portuguese descent and runs Bicha Gallery, an art gallery located at the London’s South Bank ,which he opened in 2009 with partner John Bryson. The gallery represents living contemporary artists from Australia, Botswana, Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, Norway, Spain, the US and the UK – working in ceramics, drawing, installation, metal work, mixed media, painting, photography, printmaking, and sculpture. Antonio’s other career as an architect has taken him to architectural practices in Ahmedabad, India.

Sue Hubbard is a freelance art critic, novelist and poet. Twice winner of the London Writers competition she was the Poetry Society's first-ever Public Art Poet and created a number of site-specific poems as part of a visual arts project in Birmingham's jewellery quarter. She was also commissioned by the Arts Council and the BFI to create London's biggest art poem that leads from Waterloo to the IMAX and was writer-in-residence at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill during ArchiTEXT week. Her first collection, Everything Begins with the Skin, was published by Enitharmon in 1994 and a number of her poems appeared in Oxford Poets 2000 published by Carcanet. Her latest collection Ghost Station was published by Salt Publishing in 2004. Depth of Field, her first novel, was published in 2000. Sue Hubbard is a regular contributor to The Independent and The New Statesman where she writes on contemporary art. In 2006 she was awarded a major Arts Council Literary Award.

For further details about Seven Fridays and more on Lola Perrin's remarkable work visit http://www.lolaperrin.com/


Lola Perrin photographed by Nazarin Montag