Jamie xx Creates Contemporary Ballet Score Inspired by Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes

Jamie xx has composed a contemporary ballet score inspired by Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, Tree of Codes, which will be performed at next year’s Manchester International Festival from July 2 – 10. The ballet will take place at the Manchester Opera House.

“Tree of Codes” will be choreographed by Wayne McGregor in an environmental created by visual artist Olafur Eliasson; soloists and other dancers from The Paris Opera Ballet and McGregor’s Random Dance Company will perform it. According to a press release, it took the creative team two years to craft a ballet around the novel’s concept.

Tickets for the event go on sale at 10 AM November 20. The cost is £12 – £45.

Choreographer Wayne McGregor said of the collaboration:

‘Jonathan Safran Foer’s enigmatic novel Tree of Codes is an immersive sculptural work that brilliantly hovers between words and spaces, surfaces and layers, pasts and futures. Its post apocalyptic narrative and reinvention of the process of reading itself catapults your imagination into bracing liminal states. These blurred and disorientating worlds provide a powerful point of departure for our collaboration on stage — where constellations of light, shadows, bodies, objects and sound dance at the edges of darkness.’

Eliasson added:

‘Clearly Jamie’s music can’t live without movement and space. Clearly Wayne’s choreography can’t live without sound and space. Clearly my art can’t live without sound and movement. Clearly creativity can change the world.’

The full Manchester International Festival program will be announced in February 2015.

Watch Jamie xx’ video for “Sleep Sound”:

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