Suzie Hanna
Suzie Hanna
In Other Motes of Other Myths
Emily Dickinson International Society Conference Paris 2016
Nicole Panizza-piano, Hannah Sanders-voice, Suzie Hanna-visuals
Performance, Workshop and Roundtable
Exploring poetry fragments, Emily Dickinson’s Music Folio, through voice, piano and improvised animation projection.
Our performance referenced Emily’s folio of pieces that she played on the piano and songs she sang, as well as the fragments of poetry that she wrote on the edges of envelopes and scraps of paper. Emily sang when she wrote her poetry. Her poetic form is ‘musical’ and has been scored, orchestrated and interpreted as choral and Art Music for over a hundred years. Her work is set in school curricula, and she has become familiar to a huge international community. The pieces she played included much of the salon music of the time, large orchestral pieces re-arranged for domestic performance, as well as scored folk music, such as Rose of Allandale. We approached our improvised live performance in the spirit of Experiment, the theme of the conference. The improvisation was built onto a structure of four sections, exploring Emily’s routine rhythms, her domestic daily life, interrupted by her passionate poetry.
Short clip of the performance on vimeo >>
We performed in June 2017, as part of ReLit Summer School, Worcester College, Oxford, see website > and at Oxford Literary Festival on March 17th 2018 see website>