Written during the first Gulf War One, the piece Sahara Dust looks at a contracting and increasingly chaotic world, where people can wake up to find Sahara dust (rain bearing particles of sand from the Sahara desert) on their doorstep and see distant conflicts on their televisions. "This is not a time to undervalue the despair and infinite hope of small private, day to day things; we can trace the vein of a leaf or fly over vast landscapes, but what we carry with us depends on our entire personal history," writes Lindsay Cooper.
The British composer Lindsay Cooper concentrated particularly on collaborations involving text, film, dance or theatre as in the piece The Gold Diggers (with Sally Potter) or The Song of the Shirt. The text for Sahara Dust was written by the Australian singer/writer/director Robyn Archer, with whom Lindsay Cooper has in the past collaborated on songs, concerts, radio cabaret programms and theater productions. |