Beach Crossings – Pacific Footprints

You are invited to a compelling performance in words, music and film presented by Mike Cooper and Brent Clough.

Beach Crossings is an audiovisual voyage across culture, time and self featuring legendary Blues, ‘world’ and Avant-garde musician, writer and film-maker, Mike Cooper.

“A view from both sides of the beach where the beach is a metaphor as well as a reality to be crossed. A space of meeting and departure on several levels.”

Beach Crossings-Pacific Footprints is a meditation in words and music on the European presence and colonization in the Pacific from the first landing of the Dolphin at Tahiti in 1766 up until the dropping of the atomic bomb in World War two on Hiroshima and contemporary colonization practices.

Rome-based Blues, ‘world’ and Avant-garde musician, writer and film-maker, Mike Cooper has created a musical suite informed by some of the ideas of the late Australian anthropologist Greg Dening, who spent a lifetime engaged in cross-cultural research with special attention to the experience of beach-combers – people who were forced to cross from their former European lives and adapt to new Pacific realities.

Commissioned by radio producer Pino Saulo for RAI3 Radio in Italy, who suggested doing something which might include the Bob Dylan song Masters Of War; a version of which closes the piece, it was originally conceived as a live performance piece for a flexible number of musicians and a narrator. ABC Radio National’s The Night Air commissioned a version in English which was narrated by Brent Clough on 15th March 2009.

Brent Clough rejoins Mike for this live presentation of Beach Crossings-Pacific Footsteps which is accompanied by a video, originally shot on super 8 film by Mike Cooper in various Pacific locations entitled ‘Planet Pacific-Pieces Of Heaven?’

Please arrive at 6pm as there’ll be refreshments and tropical mood music in the wonderful Institute’s ‘secret’ backyard garden before the performance at 7.30pm. Dress: beach style.

Enquiries: 0402419504   senorbamboo@hotmail.com

Photo credit: Greg Weight  www.gregweightphoto.com.au

Sunday March 3, 2013,

The Randwick Literary Institute,
60 Clovelly Road, Randwick,
6pm-9.30pm.