MUSICAL PORTRAITS
The No Man’s Land project is an eighty-minute live ‘cinema concert. A multimedia work, deeply moving, it bridges generations, cultures, and beliefs, and deals with the devastating effects and the futility of war. A commission to award-winning composer John Psathas, it was premiered in 2016, at New Zealand’s Celebrations for the End of World War I.
One hundred and fifty musicians, descendants of enemies in the Great War, filmed on battlefields around the world, ‘converse’ from the screen with an ensemble of seven performers onstage. Like a universal orchestra, the musicians, both onstage and onscreen, offer a unique audiovisual experience.
If we could go back in time and say to those on the battlefield, ‘Guess what will happen on the exact spot where you are standing, a hundred years from now’, would they have believed us? If we say the same thing to the fighters of ongoing armed conflicts, will they believe us? […] We are waging wars against our own species. And yet, even at our worst moments, humanity and empathy are not lost. The story I narrate musically ends in gestures of courtesy: ‘enemies’ offer each other water, cigarettes, a shoulder to lean on; it ends, unbelievably enough, in the most curious and dangerous invention of the human mind, the place called ‘no man’s land’.
John Psathas
Musical Composition–Production John Psathas
Producer–Director Jasmine Millet
Cinematographer Mathew Knight
Sound Engineer George Kariotis
Editor Roger Grant
Onstage:
Jack Hooker guitars
James Illingworth keyboards
Vangelis Karipis percussion
Jolanta Kossakowska vocals / violin
Sophia Lambropoulou kanun
Caleb Robinson bass
Stratis Psaradellis Politiki lyra / lyra / saz
With the support of the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Embassy of New Zealand in Greece
