Piano
Ritual
The Invisible
A candlelit evening, with seasonal food.
Towards another way of listening.
Where // The Piano Factory, London
When // 7:30pm, Saturday 10th December 2022
Book Tickets Here : Piano Factory London
“Orb” image above created by artist Ceri Isaac, used with kind permission.
Cassie Yukawa-McBurney has created, and performs in, an evening where she invites you, through guided participation, to listen to the spaces that hold us.
It is neither a conventional concert nor an act of theatre. In her own words she describes it as
“…an evening where Sound, Space and Seasonal food will invite us to spend time listening in a way that tends to our connection with the invisible.”
Where ::: In the space of a north London Piano Factory, that once produced pianos which transformed the houses of people who needed music, this invitation extends beyond that of a musical performance.
“…. So I would like to invite you, as well as coming to listen, to taste, that you also come with the intention to share this time… with your personal, beloved departed ancestors - this maybe people you love and name…
But it could also be a memory, landscape, an animal, a lost dream, sacred tree, part of our earth or any being that has vanished. Something which you long to connect with, and is no longer in physical form.
This I see and feel as an intimate honouring, and an invitation to acknowledge what is valuable to your soul.”
“Trees are sanctuaries… whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.”
Herman Hesse ‘Wandering’ 1920
How ::: The journey towards this performance, is one of tree-like growth of many years and with numerous branches.
New Growth ::: In 2009 the birth of her first child, shifted the direction of her growth in ever branching ways. The experience of child birth radically shifted consciousness through a direct experience of feminine nature, liminal realms and the divine feminine as nature itself. Cassie began making rituals where the invisible guided and carried her Mothering of 3 children, whilst also evolving her playing, binding her home-making with her soul journey.
Through the creativity awoken to craft portals in everyday domestic living, a new chapter emerges, marrying her pianism with activism, the everyday with the mystical.
Photograph : Polly Baton-Brown’s beloved horse Bouncer
Fruit ::: As an offering of gratitude, the benefits and proceeds from the evening’s ticket sales will be contributed towards Polly Paton-Brown’s remarkable service & the considerable expense of laying her beloved horse Bouncer to rest.
The evening has been directly inspired by the work of Polly Baton-Brown: Doll-Lady, Artist and Sacred Scribe, who has worked intimately with the wisdom of her herd of horses. In the week that this “Honouring for the Dead and the Living” was imagined, Polly’s beloved horse Bouncer crossed over. Bouncer, alongside many horses, trees & elementals, have profoundly inspired the Elder wisdom of Polly’s teachings - which has been a huge influence on the creation of this event.
Polly has worked in expressive arts for over 25 years. As a psychotherapist specialising in trauma she used ritual, connection to the land and creative activities to help people integrate their experiences and move into their potential. Polly is a Wisdom Council Member of the Abbey of the Arts and a member of faculty of Mythica, an organisation committed to the arts, led by Dr Kayleen Asbo. An experienced retreat and workshop facilitator, Polly combines creativity and spirituality, working with people of all faiths and none. Painting, collage, spinning and dance have all been part of her journey.
Roots ::: Cassie grew from a Japanese and British root, seeding a childhood relationship with the piano in Tokyo, and growing into an internationally acclaimed artist based in London. As well as piano performances, her collaborative branches extended to composers, musicians, artists, theatre makers, writers, filmmakers and across multiple forms.
Immediately after her critically acclaimed South Bank Centre debut in 2005 she was invited to play at venues such as the Royal Albert Hall, Almeida Theatre, Wigmore Hall, Ether Festival at the QEH, Cadogan Hall, London Film Festival 50th anniversary event in Trafalgar Square, The Music Festival of the Hamptons and also Carnegie Hall, New York in 2008 - which featured in VOGUE magazine USA.
Alongside solo performances and other events, increasingly her work presented the work of contemporary composers and other artists such as the 2009 immersive work she collaborated on, conceived by the Swedish artist-duo Lundahl&Seitl: "Symphony of a Missing Room" at the international Salzburg Festival.
In 2013, “The Memory of W.T. Stead” was conceived for the site of the legendary piano makers Steinway & Sons in London, by Cassie Yukawa-McBurney, Lundhl&Seitl and NOMAD: a site-specific work investigating the structure of sound, perception, movement and memory, where 6 ‘viewers’ embark on a psycho-acoustic journey, guided by headphones, music, narrative and unseen hands.
Following that, together, they gradually created a new piece “Eternal Return” where Cassie contributed a piano performance which premiered at the STRP festival in Holland in 2019 - a virtual reality work, created by Lundahl&Seitl, alongside VR creators ScanLab, was also featured in the BFI London Film Festival in 2021 and is currently showing in New York.
In November 2021 she performed at COP26, Glasgow in support of a movement with a growing global network of lawyers, diplomats, and people across all sectors of civil society, working towards making ECOCIDE AN INTERNATIONAL CRIME.
Guided by the trees that appeared in her dreams, Cassie now lives at the edge of the woods in the Slad Valley, Gloucestershire with her beloved husband, 3 children, chihuahua, guinea pigs and a white cat. She curates soul-space events at the Piano Factory, London.
Guides and Shelterers ::: J.S. Bach, Simon, Noma, Teyo, Mamie & Fendi McBurney, Steinway & Sons UK, Pause Place, Grandmother Ash tree, Polly Higgins, Jojo Mehta, Arushka Wolfheart Pollard, Katie Abbott, Rebecca Moore, Lucy Chenery, Kate White, Lou Vilstrup, Bill Cumming, Perdita Finn, Julia Colwell, Jac O’Keeffe, Martina Seitl, Christer Lundahl, Michael Smythe, NOMAD Projects, Aisha Paris, Kaitlyn Crossley, Lucy Lee, Lesley Bayly-Bureau, Nancy Trotter-Landry, Johnny & Amir, Jenni Roditi & The Improvisers' Choir, Arvo Pärt, Tara Shaw-Jackson, Kate Dineen, Noemi Gregoire, Jessica Lewers, Tim Hardy, Alicia Carey, Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking, Andrew Mountain-Pike, Colin Turner, Aki & Susanne, Lucy Garcia, Tim Bell, Paul Rhys, Sarah Durham-Wilson, Maria and Naty Posada, Dickson Mbi, Janet Channon, Gracie Mendus, Giuseppe Mascoli, Charlotte & Helena McBurney, Manjir Samanta-Laughton, Kaia Dineen-Head, Freja Vilstrup, Guthrie Sebag-Montefiore, Stephen Jenkinson, Marion Woodman, John Berger, Nitin Sawhney, Jeffrey Mishlove, Carl Jung, Adele Rymer, Herman Hesse, Tara Shaw-Jackson, Vera de Chalambert, Jacque Wilday, Sofia Georgio, Marcello Magni, Bouncer, Sophie Strand, Takako Yukawa & Sara Saunders.
Polly Higgins is the founder of STOP ECOCIDE who died in 2019. She was a friend and profound inspiration to Cassie, furthering her activism. As is and does her successor in the same organisation, the phenomenal Jojo Mehta.
In 2019, Cassie embarked on a PAUSE PLACE journey of the soul with a group of women who changed her life, created by the respected spiritual teacher, Katie Abbott : author & founder of Pause Place, dedicated to the strength of love, presence and connection.
Cassie is currently embarked on a “Time Travellers” exploration with Perdita Finn : an extraordinary teacher and author of The Way of the Rose and Take Back the Magic, who offers a series of journeys into the underworld to recover lost collaborations and engage in healing conversations with those who have passed on.
Rebecca Moore is co-steward of the Piano Factory, where she supports people to connect more deeply to themselves and each other; holding spaces that invite people to be who they are - loved and celebrated in their truest expression.
Sara Saunders, my beloved spirit sister and teacher, thanking you as we continue to hold hands at the most powerful thresholds.
M o t h e r h o o d
C o l l a b o r a t i o n
Memory of W.T. Stead at Steinway & Sons, London
Collaboration with Lundahl & Seitl, NOMAD & Steinway & Sons
I lay my ten fingers on the keyboard and imagine music. My fingers copy this mental image as I press the keys… The anatomical reality of my hands and the configuration of the piano keyboard have transformed my imaginary constructs.
György Sándor Ligeti (1923-2006)
In a darkened room, a single light source illuminates a pair of hands poised over a piano keyboard, about to play Ligeti’s Étude, Pour Irina. Nearby six people sat at grand pianos are about to embark alone on a psycho-acoustic journey, guided by unseen hands. In this strange intimate work – created for the London showroom of legendary piano maker Steinway & Sons – the viewer becomes the protagonist, immersed in a synaesthetic narrative of memory, perception and timelessness.
The installation brings together Bach and the avant-garde Ligeti – composers who lived almost three hundred years apart – with allusions to the parapsychological musings of W.T. Stead, a journalist who foretold his own death on the Titanic. The work manifests in the atmospheric piano showroom, workshops and rehearsal studios of Steinway & Sons, in the evening when the building is empty of its craftsmen and sales people, and only a single pianist remains.
Eternal Return
Virtual Reality Art Installation
Lundahl & Seitl & ScanLAB Projects
Eternal Return consists of three intertwined art works, a book and the physical and virtual representations of them. Looking through wireless VR goggles shows you the world as a digital point cloud universe that works in the same way as elementary particles. The sculptures and functional objects are reminiscent of a theatre left deserted at night. Every object, each with its own origin, flows in different layers of time: a railing from the Titanic walkway is held up by the weight of a 3,5-billion-year-old microbial mat, a 3D printed door handle floats in mid-air, a Victorian headboard, a chandelier, a desk and a sound-proof door from the Steinway piano workshop.
A mixed reality installation in the form of an art exhibition.
The Memor
In The Memor; one of three encounters in the Eternal Return, a piano workshop from Steinway & Sons’ legendary London workshop emerges out of a teacup, and the room spirals around the visitor until they are fully immersed inside it. When the visitor touches the workshop interior they simultaneously, from an outside perspective, also touch the sculptural abstractions in the physical installation of the work. The object materialises in the surface contact with the visitor’s hand. Letting go of the object collapses the world of the piano workshop into a dark void, where the small points of sea dust particles move in rhythm with the movement of waves under water. Inside the dimly lit piano-tuners’ workshop at Steinway and Sons, the visitor will discover an abandoned tool: a hammer (metaphorically, Heidegger’s Hammer). While the hammer will appear visually complete within the virtual environment, if the participant tries to pick it up it will physically feel incomplete; a negative empty space of the hammer is carved out of the workshop-table (visible in the physical exhibition). In this manner, we are composing a bifurcated self where the physical and virtual are conflicting with each other, yet it is ultimately up to the visitors in which realm they are most present.
Another moment stages the event of the visitor passing through the workshop’s walls. By first touching a solid wall and then being convinced it is made up by millions of subatomic particles, the visitor is instructed to walk straight through it. The friction of passing through is felt and heard through a vibration. On the other side, pianist Cassie Yukawa-McBurney plays Bach’s Fugue in A minor.
The voice tells you that she is here, but YOU are not.
_
CREDITS
Eternal Return by Lundahl & Seitl (SWE) and ScanLAB Projects* (UK).
STRP co-production.
The book Eternal Return - The Memor is written by architect and theorist Malin Zimm.
Script collaboration: Malin Zimm.
J. S. Bach’s Fugue in A Minor BWV 543 written for the organ, arranged by Liszt for piano, is performed by Cassie Yukawa-McBurney.
Dramaturgy by Rachel Alexander.
Performers: Pia Nordin, Lena Kimming & Sara Lindström.
* ScanLAB Projects team: Matt Shaw, Max Čelar, Soma Sato, Manuela Mesrie, Reuben Carter, Jacques Pillet, Will Trossell, Dorka Makai.
https://strp.nl/program/eternal-return
https://scanlabprojects.co.uk/
Ecocide Law
“It's a simple re-alignment of human law with a higher moral code:
FIRST DO NO HARM.”
Deeply honoured and grateful to STOP ECOCIDE campaign leader Jojo Mehta - beloved soul sister, ever-inspirational and phenomenal being who invited me to share a few words about why I stand for ECOCIDE LAW.
When exploring current and scientific thought, it is clear that a new perception of the world and ‘nature’ is being birthed.
We are beginning to see our planet as a living, evolving process of life itself.
Human beings don’t just live on earth, we are intrinsically connected to the entire web of a living universe.
So when I experience that my own body is not where ‘I’ begin and end, there is an understanding that I am connected to every single part of life.
I am not here as an activist for nature as a separate entity, I am standing as a protector for nature, which lives within me.
The deforestation of the Amazon is destroying my lungs, the rivers are my veins, the mountains are my ears.
For me, nothing expresses this interconnectedness more powerfully than the movement which brings Ecocide alive as an internationally recognised crime.
It is the single most elegant response to our collective body, to consciously take care of our earth, which is simply taking care of ourselves.
Please visit ECOCIDE LAW
