A bald description of Laura Bowler’s Distance would be chamber music for soprano and quintet. But when that soprano is the fearless, sound-barrier-breaking Juliet Fraser, collaborating with members of the fearsome New York-based Talea Ensemble, it’s a different matter.
Bowler has created a multimedia work for them throwing an aural challenge to the listener, setting up an engagement with the ethics of flight and its implications for the environment. In the video-led preamble, an interactive questionnaire invited the audience – via-mobiles – to make a personal investment in the work to follow, examining their consciences. Similarly, Bowler had questioned Fraser, using her feelings about flying as a recurring element of Distance’s text, making Fraser’s identity as a musician an implicit part of the work. Quotes from anthropologist Tim Ingold’s book Correspondences were also integrated.
