There’s an extra edge to being in a crowd these days. Once we might have asked, will this crowd jostle or crush me? Now we ask, will this crowd make me sick? Will this crowd kill me? As new waves of Covid and new variants keep coming, we wonder: will we ever feel truly comfortable in crowds again?
Richard Tognetti, artistic director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, has spent the last few years thinking about crowds. From his home in Sydney, the musician and composer has been working on a new production with director Nigel Jamieson called The Crowd and I, which pairs footage of crowds – everything from Black Lives Matter protests to Spain’s annual mass tomato fight – with a live orchestra playing in time.
