Angel View is a performance piece created by British composer Juliana Hodkinson in collaboration with the music- and performance ensemble Scenatet, who commissioned the work along with SPOR Festival and MaerzMusik/Berliner Festspiele, where the work was premiered in 2014. Described by The Journal of Music as “boundless”, Angel View is an assemblage of urban and musical debris, somewhere between a wordless live radio play, enacted film soundtrack, and instrumental theatre. Made up of over twenty parts, each designed to overlap, the work’s architecture is full of non-sequiturs and arbitrary cross-relations between imagined streets intersecting and running parallel, reflecting the surrealism at the core of everyday life.

In 2018, after having performed the work several times, Scenatet and Hodkinson decided to transform the underlying score and live concert of Angel View into a cinematic work. The resulting film, directed by danish filmmaker Michael Madsen, explores and expands the cinematic and theatrical components that were already at work in the original performance to create a boundary pushing work that manages to be at once humorous and strikingly poetic. The film was premiered in installation format at SPOR Festival 2018.

“Eating a Man” [..] was crazy. Spor Festival 2021 did not offer tasty tapas, but went for the main course: The urge to perform spills out of the works being written today, the musicians refuse to be reduced to mediators, and the composers want to be there where it happens”

“Christensen’s music teases the attention rather than demanding it in a big forte fortissimo. Similarly, it was also clear that something important is at stake in Eating a Man. But it was liberatingly unclear whether the gaze is directed at Christensen himself as a form of cathartic self-insight or at a prejudiced and xenophobic outside world.”

“Tonen slogs direkt an i Christian Winther Christensens kammaropera Eating a Man. Denna hade premiär i en första version på Spor 2009 och kretsade då kring en ritual att äta en människa för att på så vis låta denna leva vidare efter sin död. Sedan dess har tonsättaren bildat familj och denna levnadssituation utgjorde i den nya versionen en utvidgad fond där en snabbuppspelning av familjens filmade vardag kring mat- och arbetsbordet ställs mot det sceniska i form av sångerskan Clara Stensgaard, mamman i familjen. Genom denna dubbelexponering skapas en sällsam reflektion kring tid, förgänglighet och kanske uppoffring för den andra eller sin nästa. Allt är tonsatt med Winther Christensens typiska subtila klanger och musikaliska motiv.”

Performers: My Hellgren (vlc), Vicky Wright (cl), Rowland Sutherland (fl), Matias Seibæk (perc), Fei Nie (pno), Kasia Ziminska (vio), Clara Stensgaard (voc)
Composer: Christian Winther Christensen
Staging and direction: Anna Berit Asp Christensen
Video: Christian Winther Christensen and Anna Berit Asp Christensen
Light design: Maria Pi Houmann
Technical Manager: Mette Hornbek Hansen
Performance images: Marc Fluri

The Creative Europe programme of the European Union, Sounds Now, The Danish Arts Foundation, Augustinus Fonden, KODA Cultur and William Demant Fonden.