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Cold Calling: The Arctic Project
Birmingham Rep Studio
*** COLD calling is a creative collaboration
between the CBSO and the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Composer Nick Powell,who has worked in both
theatre and television, was commissioned to write this piece, which
fuses projection and dialogue with a twenty piece orchestra. It’s something of misdirection in its title and
marketing and it has little to do with the artic or any specific images
of it, being more about the bleakness of loss of communication. Cold Calling is a term often used for the
telephone sales calls that seem to blight our lives everyday with, for
instance, claims for PPI insurance or double glazing. In the work we see short spoken pieces on wrong
numbers, broken or misheard conversations, and poor connections. These
are delivered by actors Jan Pearson and Waleed Akhtar who represent the
very different and opposing aspects of modern day telephone
communication.
Powell’s work draws his principle artic
references from his own personal circumstances of loss and birth. With
it being composed in a Norwegian winter it’s easy to see how his work is
directed to the isolation and cold aspect of both his emotional state
and his geography. Jonathan Bloxahm conducted the twenty piece
orchestra and in the setting of the Studio theatre the sound felt
limited given the deep aspect of Powell’s visionary ideas. It’s a very chordal piece opening with simple
statements reminiscent of Hans Zimmer but lacking the depth of sound due
to the limited numbers of players. It moves on to aspects of frenetic experimental
energy representing what seemed to be the chaos of modern life and the
billions of electronic connections. These sections were arpeggio based
and much like the work of Philp Glass which repeat in a way with
continuing levels of complexity. The staging featured simple strips of suspended
clear or white plastic on to which were projected a series of
impressionist and defocused images of wintry effects. The effect was
interesting but these were featured in only about a half of the
performance and at other times were just plainly lit. Overall there
seems to have been scope to visually develop this part of the
performance to a greater degree as they greatly contributed to the
atmosphere of the work and so were missed when they were gone. Given its subject Cold Calling, in its 50 minutes
running time, has obviously little room for any warmth and with the
given limitations of the setting and size of orchestra it’s an
interesting concept but at times leaves you a little cold and detached.
To 17-09-16 Jeff Grant 16-09-16
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