Van Gogh: A Synaesthetic Approach to Performance

van gogh painting detail as background, with oranges and blues (unknown subject)

Project Lead:

Hannah Schneider (St John's College)

Partner Organisations:

The Ashmolean Museum

Oxford Alternative Orchestra at St John’s College

 

What was it like to taste blue? To see D major? Through an innovative staging of a contemporary opera, this project explored the connections between the senses, and the connections between our senses and our understanding of reality.

Van Gogh was a work of contemporary art music by composer Michael Gordon, which drew on the letters of the artist Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo for its inspiration and direction. Over the course of sixty-three minutes, the musicians traced Van Gogh’s development as an artist and ultimately his descent into madness.

The staging principles were largely founded on the theory of “(syn)aesthetics”. This term, coined by Josephine Machon, used synaesthesia to understand the power of sensory perception in performance. Expanding beyond the relationships between senses, (syn)aesthetics explored connections between sensation and interpretation/sense-making, exploiting the audience’s sensory experience to enhance their understanding of an artistic work. Whilst this was most strongly present through sight and sound, other senses such as smell, taste and touch were also essential. This lent itself to a style of staging that relied heavily on an innovative use of technology and design to complement the music and live action.

The project aimed to stage this work in a way that teased out its multiple strands and sources of meaning: musical, narrative, psychological, sensual and emotional. Van Gogh was neither opera nor theatre; instead, it combined the sharpest tools of both genres to contemplate Vincent’s life. Each movement, through complex rhythm and harmony, created a distinct soundworld that evoked not only the city in which it was set, but also Van Gogh’s state of mind at that point in time.

 

Contact:

Hannah Schneider: hannah.schneider@sjc.ox.ac.uk

 

Watch The Voice of Van Gogh: A synaesthetic exploration of the life of the painter through Michael Gordon’s opera Van Gogh

https://www.youtube.com/embed/1a4dHMLAVWo

 

The Voice of Van Gogh: A synaesthetic exploration of the life of the painter through Michael Gordon’s opera Van Gogh

https://www.youtube.com/embed/1a4dHMLAVWo

 

 

Collaborators for this project:

Headshot of woman smiling at camera, wearing a black top, holding a conductor stick

Hannah Schneider

Project Lead / Music Director

St John's College

 

Hannah Schneider is assistant conductor of the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra (2018-2020) and founder and music director of Oxford Alternative Orchestra, an ensemble dedicated to the intersection of classical music and social impact. She is the initiator of the Oxford Philharmonic’s Side by Side education project, and thrives in conducting the orchestra’s contemporary repertoire. She conducts professionally in Russia, the UK, the United States, and the Ukraine, including engagements in 2019-2020 with the Lviv Philharmonic Orchestra, Yakutsk Philharmonic Orchestra, Chelyabinsk Philharmonic Orchestra, Kaluga Young Symphony Orchestra, Smolensk Regional Philharmonic Orchestra, So&So (USA), and Ballet Hartford (USA). 

Balck and white of man with dark hair and thick frame glases, grey turtleneck

Jonny Danciger

Stage Director and Technical designer

Freelance director

As an interdisciplinary practitioner, I thrive on using my experience in sound design, composition, direction, performance and other creative disciplines to inform each project. This brings a direct benefit to my clients, allowing each commission to be carried out with greater attention paid to the surrounding creative contexts and logistical factors.

 

 

sasha ramussen

Sasha Rasmussen

Project Manager

Faculty of History

My doctoral research explores the sensory world of femininity in the early twentieth century, through the experiences and perceptions of women living in Paris and St Petersburg between 1900 and 1913. The recent sensory turn in historical scholarship has seldom addressed gender as a determinant of sensory experience.  I contend that, like many other aspects of modernity, sensory experience was gendered: although contemporaries were equipped with the same ‘perceptive apparatus’ and occupied shared public spaces, a woman’s sensory world still differed markedly from that of a man, not least because her means of interpreting and assigning meaning to her experience was framed by expectations of femininity.

 

Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the

future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.