Rosie Cooper

Performance of A Mysterium (new commission for Margate Rocks 08)

Performance of A Mysterium is a half hour spectacular of music, lights and grand props. It focuses on Russian composer Scriabin’s magnum opus Mysterium, famously unrealised at the time of his death in 1915.

Scriabin’s original Mysterium is an impossibly conceived piece of music and performance that was intended to last for 7 days and nights. It was to feature an orchestra, a large choir, an instrument with visual effects, scent, coloured lights, bells hung from clouds, towers of fire, and an epic poem depicting the elements of nature battling against one another. It was also intended to signal a new race of humans that would irrevocably change the world for the better.

Taking this as the loosest of starting points, artist Rosie Cooper will be re-working these ideas, bearing in mind the vastness of Scriabin’s original piece, its visionary qualities, blind optimism, and its inevitable capacity for a failure as spectacular as the original idea itself.

This piece will feature a solo piano, and will be rather prop heavy, featuring dry ice, fairground lights, and several large papier mache mountains, representing the Himalayas, at the foot of which the original Mysterium was intended to be performed.

Rosie is collaborating on this project with pianist Jonathan Powell, lighting designer David Abra, and set designer Beck Rainford.

About the Artist

Rosie Cooper’s work references theatricality, its related signifiers and numerous props – and is at once as spectacle, a show, a disappointment and sometimes a cliche. She has shown at the V&A, Kunsthalle Wein (Austria), Gallery Enrico Fornello (Italy, Contemporanea), Danielle Arnaud, the Hackney Empire and the Museum for Objects of Vertu. She is also a freelance curator whose projects include the Surrealist Ball at the V&A, and Wild Gift: a show of live art with critic David Lillington.

Workshop

Rosie Cooper will be running a family drop-in workshop in response to her work on Saturday 10 May. The workshop asks you to imagine a future in which humans are no longer present on earth - having polluted all natural resources beyond all use! Your challenge is to create puppets and animated props in response to this vision. Click here to find out more.

www.rosiecooper.info

_{Rosie Cooper, Performance of a Mysterium, the Walpole Bay Hotel, Margate Rocks 08. Photography © Simon Welsford}