Phantasm, Aldeburgh Festival review - new sounds for old

Masterpieces made over, reimagined and reborn beside the Suffolk sea
20.06.2023 - theartsdesk.com

BOYD TONKIN

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A Sunday-afternoon show at the Snape campus’s Britten Studio again saw old music and new visions intertwine. Led by Laurence Dreyfus, the viol consort Phantasm collaborated with a dance troupe (choreographed by Sommer Ulrickson) and visual artist Alexander Polzin on The Art of Being Human. On a bare stage, craggy fibre-glass sculptures split apart into islands, then reform into a kind of continental landmass. Dancers, alone or in couples and groups, enact elemental rites of birth, death, love, community, conflict, rejection and reconciliation (pictured above and below). Throughout, cream-clad viol players sit with, and move among, the dancers. What they play, with mellow beauty and togetherness, is remarkable: viol pieces written in the English Renaissance and Baroque eras, from Byrd and Dowland to William Lawes, Gibbons and finally Purcell. The dancers enact an abbreviated human history of attraction, sociability, tribalism, acceptance, persecution and peace-making. Their gestures, meetings and partings find a counterpart (and counterpoint) in the music’s development – from ritualism through courtliness to the urgent, idiosyncratic selfhood of a voice such as Purcell’s.

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