Vitalstatistix acknowledges that we, and our home Waterside, are on Kaurna Country, its sovereignty never ceded. We acknowledge Kaurna people as the continuing custodians of the Adelaide Plains who have a spiritual relationship with this land. We respect their cultural authority. We pay our respect to Kaurna Elders, past, present and emerging, and through them to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
You Are Jeff
Dan Thorpe with Britt Plummer and Evan J Lawson (SA & VIC)
You Are Jeff is a composed theatre piece for pianist and orchestra, inspired by Siken’s Crush, evoking a portrait of queer discovery, self-reflection, rage and sensuality.
Dan Thorpe is a classically trained composer, pianist and performer, with an interest in theatrical work, queer work and genre-decimating work. He has performed and has been performed around the world. His latest work is a concerto for acting pianist and chamber orchestra, with text from the eponymous Siken poem, commissioned by Forest Collective as part of a portrait concert in development for premiere in late 2021.
With Forest Collective’s director and conductor Evan Lawson and theatre maker Britt Plummer, Dan is drawing from a text that spurred his art practice out of the closet to make a collaborative, transcendent and very personal concert debut.
Creative Team: Composer and pianist – Dan Thorpe; Director and dramaturg – Britt Plummer; Artistic Director, Forest Collective – Evan Lawson; the musicians of Forest Collective
This project is commissioned and supported by the Forest Collective.
Image: Sia Duff
Published on
4 September
Live+Local
Performance: Solo queer poetics, a double bill showing of sections from Hot Body by Grace Marlow and You Are Jeff by Daniel Thorpe
Friday September 11 at 9pm
Residency Outcome
My 20th year was a big one. Freshly out to my parents, I did the only rational thing and left the country for California. In my first semester abroad, I found myself in a poetry seminar; I wrote about boys, lust, and sadness in a way that only sad boys in their early 20s can — badly. But, as bad as it was, it was the first time I wrote anything that was openly queer. Nora Bergamino, fearless poet and fabulous tutor, casually asked me a question after class that would change the direction of my career (and indeed my life) forever: “but your music is like this too, right?” I’ve been writing unapologetically queer music ever since. She ended up introducing me to Siken’s Crush, and I’d never experienced anything like it; and when I’ve suffered losses of my own — of a lover, of friends — it was always Siken I returned to first; his quietly simmering rage, fear, and sensuality — and his physical/emotional car-crash tendency — mirroring my own.
Which brings us to this project. You Are Jeff is a concerto for acting pianist and chamber orchestra, with text from the eponymous Siken poem, commissioned by Forest Collective. This project is a bit of a dream come true for me: making my debut as a concert pianist, and working with a text that spurred my art practice out of the closet; a chance to do something so classical, like front an orchestra, and own my queer (in every sense of the term). For Adhocracy, I wanted to explore a textural sense of what might come from this piece. The four day time-frame was a really wonderful challenge, the last time I wrote for an orchestra I had a year, and the time before six months! I sent the musicians from Forest, all of whom were in lockdown, some notated and some text based fragments/improvisation prompts to self-record, and then assembled them at home. In terms of the dramatic structure of the piece, Britt and I worked for three days in Waterside, tackling around 2/3s of the work in the end, before documenting on day four. We hope you get a sense of what this piece might be, and that it resonates for you in a way it did for us.
With love and in solidarity,
Dan Thorpe [he/him]
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