Shadow songs - A night with Le Ombre

Because I'm helping the WSO's resident composer Vincent Ho with a movie (more on that in a future post), I was able to score tickets to last night's concert with Le Ombre - the traveling silhouette dance show (trailer is below).

It was great fun being surrounded by an audience gasping and sighing with pleasure at one of the oldest arts in human history. The dancers are strong on their own, but it's the moments of inventive imagination - when twisting bodies become an animal, a building or an iconic image - that carry the show.

It's a great night at the symphony, particularly if you don't regularly attend and are looking for a show to take you by the hand, smile and pull you up onto the stage and into your imagination. Check it out if you get the chance.

Cancer, comfort and a concerto that sings the journey

Luc Leestemaker: May 18, 1957 - May 18, 2012

In 2011, Vincent Ho’s patron, collaborator and friend Luc Leestemaker phoned. He had cancer.

The LA-based visual artist and entrepreneur, who had financed Ho’s first recording when the composer leapt from academia to the professional world, told his friend how doctors had given him three months to live, tops. Leestemaker was rejecting western medicine’s death sentence, however, in favour of alternative healing practices – psychotherapy, herbal medicine, shamanism and meditation.

And he wanted his friend Vincent to compose something: a musical score for cancerland.

(Continue reading at The Spectator Tribune)