We celebrated surviving our encounters with the extraordinarily un-user-friendly US visa service too soon – the volcanic ash smothered our attempts to get to Chicago. We couldn’t just not turn up though, after so much effort had been put in to getting the show on – especially from Helen Vasey and her team at the Department of Cultural Affairs in Chicago and Robert White here in the UK. We considered doing it live down the line – which would have meant performing to an empty hall at 1.30 in the morning – but Ambrose instead stayed up all night creating a completely new, slightly shorter version of the work as a surround-sound cinematic virtual performance. This was emailed to Chicago, burned to DVD and then projected in the auditorium complete with Mick Lynch’s films. The show unfortunattely succumbed to a technical glitch towards the end but worked sufficently well for the Chicago Press to call it a ‘stunning tour de force‘. We were very sorry not to be there, but hope that we can come back next year with our next project. On the positive side, we now have a fully functional virtual version of Being Dufay that should work well for film and music festivals, saving considerably on costs.
The possibilities of performance using the world wide web was something I encouraged the Tampere Festival to look at last year. As things turned out we couldn’t get it together on that occasion, but the Chicago experience has been a great opportunity to look creatively at performance beyond the concert hall. We can, not merely in theory but also in reality, perform the piece in different countries simultaneously, or with the two of us in different countries from each other (though Ambrose is reluctant to do this until the technology is completely glitch-free) . But whether you’re saving the planet or your promotion expenses, Being Virtually Dufay reduces travel, accommodation and carbon costs…
I don’t have much luck with Chicago – though it’s one of those great American cities that everyone should experience if they have the chance. The Chicago Sun Times was one of the few papers ever to notice my performance as Pilatus in Arvo Pärt’s Passio. It reckoned I was ‘effete and degenerate’. This time round the Chicago Reader promoted me to ‘one of the most daring singers in the classical world’. They know a thing or two over there.
