ATALANTA FUGIENS : Talk and Soirée

Musician and researcher Nicole Bettencourt Coelho (NMBC) discusses the historical context, structure and content of Michael Maier’s 17th-century alchemical emblem book, Atalanta Fugiens, with its cryptic copper engravings and infamous 3-part vocal fugues.

In this book the mythic landscape of Ovid’s Metamorphosis meets the symbols of laboratory alchemy for a spectacularly slippery expression of Maier’s alchemical imaginary. It contains a plethora of gods, dragons, wolves, swords, elemental forces and the nested myths of Atalanta and the Death of Adonis, as told by Venus from a patch of soft grass.

A truly extraordinary composition, which offers a multi-sensory devotional experience through the simultaneous engagement of image, text and song. Join us to traverse the intersecting structures of music, myth, and magic at play in this historic multimodal work.

NMBC will also touch on the process of adapting this work to explore the addition of dynamic movement, through incorporation of spatial audio technologies and dance.

After the presentation there will be a Q&A as well as the classic Treadwell’s social soirée.

Nicole Bettencourt Coelho (they/them) is lead professor of live electronics at Guildhall School of Music & Drama and directs the Live Electronics Orchestra, a research initiative combining somatic methods with experimental live performance collaborations among musicians and dancers. They are currently working with an interdisciplinary team of creatives and performers towards a viscerally operatic staging of Atalanta Fugiens (1617), where immersive performance technologies become an intimate container for experimental live music and dance.