Spectral Ballroom (Hidden Door)
Spectral Ballroom
Hidden Door 2022
Thursday 16th June – installation all-day; live performance 1030pm
Old Royal High, New Parliament House, 5-7 Regent Rd, Edinburgh EH7 5BL
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Buy tickets
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One of Hidden Door’s six Creative Collaborations for 2022
This place is a dream you are trying to remember. You have been here before, but in another time, or another timeline, perhaps…
Descending the stairs, you hear slow jazz melodies, glasses chiming, familiar visions appear to flicker on the walls you pass. You thought you heard muffled voices ebbing from behind the door – a party? Or just a corrupted memory…you try to leave, but each pathway leads to another door, into an alternate recollection. The music from nowhere and everywhere goes on and on…
Spectral Ballroom invites you to a haunted chamber of fragmented nostalgias – through winding paths of immersive audio and visual spectacles, before leading you to a finale live show of a ghostly cabaret ensemble. With visuals presented by artist Florence Richardson and an original score composed by Luci Holland, performed by the Spectral Band – with Sam Irvine (alto saxophone & flute), Bado Reti (double bass), and Ben Collard (drums). Also featuring DJ sets by Mallisa and ex.sses.
Using material gleaned from the archives of the National Library of Scotland and other historical sources, this immersive performance features a specially assembled live band, playing a composition based on fragments of music from the school’s past, alongside visuals evoking a fading history.
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Music
The score is inspired by Vivas Schola Regia (Scholae Regiae Edinensis Carmen), the Royal High School song composed by Sir Alexander Mackenzie in 1895. The Hidden Door team came across a copy of the song in an old book while surveying the building for the festival, and it became the starting point for the Spectral Ballroom musical motifs, representing the soul of the building, the people who used it, and its life up to current times. The melody weaves it way throughout the soundscape appearing in different forms & genres, evolving & shifting as if skipping through time, before eventually dissipating.
At the end of April/early May, we began recording musical & textural snippets with the musicians, which I layered into the backing soundscape that will be heard both in the installation & live performance.
After the band rehearsed to meld the live performance with the backing soundscape, we put on an epic live audiovisual performance in the Central Chamber of the Old Royal High School, with Florence’s beautiful, animated visuals overlaying the musicians as they played.
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Footage
Installation & Performance:
Rehearsals:
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About Florence Richardson
Florence Richardson is an interdisciplinary artist who graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2019. Working with video, sound and textile print installations, she explores ideas of the uncanny and darkly nostalgic essences of culture – aiming to create immersive environments that invite audiences into otherworldly narratives. ‘Spectral Ballroom’ will be her third collaborative project for Hidden Door festival exploring ‘hauntology’ – a concept that considers the real-world effects of how “dead” futures can haunt the present.
About Luci Holland
Luci Holland is an award-winning Scottish (Edinburgh-based) composer and sound artist who composes and produces music and audiovisual art for film, games and concert. In 2019 Luci joined new classical music station Scala Radio to present The Console, a weekly one-hour show dedicated to celebrating great music in games. Luci additionally works as a freelance creative technologist, musical director and arts producer for various organisations including Tinderbox Collective, and also builds and designs interactive sonic art installations – presenting her custom-built site-specific dynamic sound installation CITADEL for Hidden Door 2017.
