Visual design - Joseph Daniels

Name: LiLu's Music Box
Address: GB

Design concept & Live performance - Li Lu

LiLu’s Music Box is an installation art piece combining a live performance of the Bach Cello Suite and projected video imagery.

A kaleidoscope of colour, movement and music - an immersive experience, a virtual space created by light, shadow and sound. A new way to experience this music for those familiar to Bach and those who have never heard these works before.

The artwork presents the Bach G Major Cello Suite as a metaphor for a life’s journey- from birth to beyond.

Digitally processed video of waves, bubbles and swirls of ink create pulsating, undulating scenery to accompany Li Lu’s interpretation of Bach’s masterwork.

IDEAS BEHIND THE CREATION

“By creating LiLu’s Music Box I want to realise a ‘little wonderland’ that I imagined when I was a child. In this creation, LiLu is a character in six stories that together explore the concept of a ‘cycle of life’. I want to take my audience on an imaginary life journey through an extraordinary visual and sonic environment, to experience this unique music, the Bach Cello Suites.

My initial inspiration for this creation came from participating in a Sky Arts documentary Art of Survival. In 2010, I accepted a challenge to travel across Europe in 35 days from Athens to Edinburgh, purely surviving by playing the cello. The experience of engaging an audience through playing Bach in unexpected scenarios and settings, and with food, shelter and transport depending on how well I was received, brought a new maturity, power, and immediacy to my performance. This adventure reawakened my long-held fascination with design and the visual arts and made me want to connect more with a nonclassical audience, especially children. After the journey, I recorded the complete Bach Cello Suites, entitled In love with Bach (2012) and the creation of LiLu’s Music Box is intended to distil my experience of reaching new audiences.

Great music brings people together. My desire in designing this project is to demonstrate the complexity of Bach’s masterpiece and share my personal interpretation with a diverse audience. I feel this epic music expresses a life story, each one of the six suites has its own personality and mood filled with a rich variety of human emotions. I have turned these six Cello Suites into six stories. Each story represents a different stage of life that begins at Birth, followed by Youth, Prime, The Distillation of Life, and then Transcendence. The 2nd suite represents The Mirror of Death - an interruption between Birth and Youth, expanding the dramatic effect of the whole.

There are deeply entrenched assumptions made about who listens to classical music, about where and how they do it. LiLu's Music Box is an extraordinary experiment in connecting with new audiences. Through a strong visual impact I want to draw audiences into an environment where they can experience the project and engage with it on a different number of levels: as a contemporary installation, visual performance and a live classical concert.” -LiLu

Currently, LiLu's Music Box is at the design & production stage.