As far as human emotions go, hope is a complicated one. It can be joyful. It can be fickle. It can be dangerous. Increasingly, it can be hard to come by. But above all hope is necessary – that is the message at the heart of Possible Futures, a new show at the Southbank by the composer Max Richter and his creative partner Yulia Mahr, the husband-and-wife duo behind seminal projects like SLEEP, an eight-hour album of lullabies released in 2015 and performed live to an audience in beds.
“Hope is the central theme of everything we do,” says Mahr. “We made a decision a long time ago when we were young and going on protests and doing our activism, we thought – well we’re not making much of a difference here. Is it presumptuous to even think that you can make a difference? So we started exploring that in our various practices, and we thought OK; it’s about these small impulses of hope, small impulses of connection.”
