Classical and Jazz: Preview - Gisele Edwards at St Luke’s on 3rd February
Published: 27 January, 2011
by SEBASTIAN TAYLOR
MUSIC and aerobatics are coming together at an intriguing concert next Thursday at St Luke’s, Old Street.
Leading UK aerialist Gisele Edwards will explore the church’s space, turning in the air on her ropes while music is played by acclaimed Romanian violinist Alexander Balanescu and Russian accordionist Evelina Petrova.
Aerobatic performances accompanied by music are nothing new. But the Gisele Edwards performance with musicians aims to fuse the two genres, the one adding to the other.
She came to her present occupation as an aerialist through a very circuitous route. After post-graduate work and qualifying as an equity analyst, she quit the City to train in experimental theatre, ending up in a circus school.
Her first project combining music and aerial work was with the Dante Quartet during a summer festival. “They played a Mozart string quartet and I improvised certain movements over a haystack – it worked very well,” she says. “Some music is harder to react to through aerial art than others. Fast tempos can be difficult to respond to on the rope, which has its own rhythm. The length of a natural aerial move may or may not match a particular musical phrase. With complex music, it may only be possible to respond intermittently. In general, I prefer to work with lyrical pieces, or minimalist, improvised, abstract of jazz music.”
Her next project is to recruit a keyboardist and a Chinese instrumentalist to tour as an Asian aerialist/fusion group.