Collaboration is an artform in itself, as Southbank Centre’s Multitudes festival has demonstrated over two weeks of sometimes divisive but never-less-than stimulating creative cross-fertilisation. This final concert, fusing wildly contrasting disciplines, was among the most nourishing, a performance in which each partner had immersed themselves in the working practices of the others. The palpable sense of collegiality and mutual respect was as heartwarming as the music-making.
The subject was butterflies, nature’s metamorphic miracles, whose complex physiological processes and unerring sense of purpose culminate in an eruption of kaleidoscopic colours. The multifaceted theatrical melange was the brainchild of experimental music pioneers Manchester Collective, cellist Laura van der Heijden, composer Chaines (Cee Haines), dance theatre company Thick & Tight, and the Camberwell Incredibles, an arts collective of adults with learning disabilities. The three musical works, each one introduced for the visually or aurally impaired, couldn’t have been more different – Kaija Saariaho’s coruscating Sept Papillons, Imogen Holst’s delicate The Fall of the Leaf and a new multimedia work by Chaines entitled oysters sing of silkworms – yet the whole was invariably more than the sum of its parts.
