Company Carpi’s When You Light a Candle, You Also Cast a Shadow

An announcement to make, at last! Having been floating in limbo (like the rest of us) for the past eighteen months, the wonderful Company Carpi is about to burst back into action with three public performances of When You Light a Candle, You Also Cast a Shadow, on Thursday 4th November 2021. With climate crisis and celebration of the seasons as its central themes, it features a trio of dancers, a string quintet, and some poetry written for the occasion by me. Here’s a taste:

And there, life, the soar of it
The swerve
The nerve
The sheer, pure, unremittable verve of it
Hatching out into the pure glad day
The gorse a burst of yolk-yellow joy

You can read more about the event on Company Carpi’s website. Tickets for the performances are available from Lancaster Arts. The work was commissioned in 2019 by Dance Consortia Northwest, Warrington Museum & Art Gallery and Lancaster Arts. It was originally scheduled for performance in September 2020.

Bettina Carpi and Gary Lloyd are the creators of the extraordinary operatic pieces, based on Dotter of her Father’s Eyes, that were performed at Dublin Worldcon in 2019. You can browse their photo gallery of it here.