Music for dance
NEWS: PERFORMANCES
MNEMOSYNE, a new work for the Prague Quadrenniale in June 2011, will be presented at the Auckland Festival 2011 as part of FLY-TOWER at AUT from Marc 6 - 13. This work will see Carol Brown performing solo with music from Russell Scoones within Dorita Hannah's design.
TONGUES OF STONE, a dance collaborative site-specific performance for the streets of Perth, Western Australia had further research in March 2010. Performances will be from April 8 - 17 2011. Choreographer Carol Brown, theatre designer Dorita Hannah and composer Russell Scoones are collaborating with Perth dance company Strut Dance and members of the local dance community. Russell is designing a sound score to be worn with headphones and mp3 players sounds and texts found and created within the local environment. See it here
Auckland dance company Touch Compass had a sell-out season in August 2010 at the Auckland Concert chamber which included Russell and Carol's piece SLIP. The company are soon to embark on a series of North Island performances with this and other works. SLIP and the company received excellent reviews including a 'Touchstone Award' from The NZ Listener which felt the work was "remarkable".
Philadelphia based company Subcircle have just completed the first phase of a newly commissioned work called SEED which will be created by Carol and Russell with Subcircle in New Zealand with further research in Europe followed by the production in Philadelphia in November 2011.
Since 1990 Russell has collaborated on dance works with his partner choreographer Carol Brown. After early works for Dance=Arts in Dunedin New Zealand, Carol & Russell continued when they moved to the UK in 1992. A successful NZ tour of The Mechanics of Fluids in 1995 and performances on London's South Bank and The Place Theatre led to the formation of Carol Brown Dances in 1996. Russell toured frequently with the company as composer/tour manager as Carol's work was given presentations at international festivals and venues with a diverse range of dance performance pieces. These included theatre works, site-specific pieces, installations and film.
Russell's composition style and techniques have included voice, text, live, sampled and recorded music and found sounds, each a response to the concepts of the work. At times real instruments have been used for such pieces as Like a House on Fire, Ocean Skin and The Glory Box, while other works have demanded different approaches. Nerve sourced found sounds from under bridges in Philadelphia and the Pantheon in Rome, while Aarero Stone used rocks, wood, glass and metal. See it here
Russell's self release Russ L Skoons: Danceworks (1999) brought together a collection of pieces from collaborations with Carol Brown. Songs, Dance & Darpana Music (2006) brought together a collection of original songs alongside pieces from Aarero Stone and music made with the classical Indian dance musician of Darpana Dance Company in Ahmedabad, India. These are available on CD by request at russell@russellscoonesmusic.com.
Russell continues to collaborate occasionally with Carol. 2007 saw the large scale commission GLOW in Woking and Carol's solo Dancing Aloud in Auckland, Bath and London in 2008.More recent works include SLIP for Auckland dance company Touch Compass and TONGUES OF STONE for Perth based Strut Dance
For a full list of dance works see www.carolbrowndances.com.