I’ve finally got around to a post about the show about Charles Dickens which I did with Jeremy Harmer for the British Council 2012 Dickens celebrations in February. We played the show at the British Medical Association headquarters in Tavistock Square in London – the site of a house which Dickens lived in for several years.
“Bent and Broken into a Better Shape: The magical storytelling of Charles Dickens” was given in front of a live audience and was also webcast and filmed for a British Council DVD. Jeremy have since repeated the show in Israel, and will be taking it to various places, including the USA and Mexico, later this year.
Here I’ve embedded the live video footage from the British Council website. I do hope you enjoy it! It was much more of a talk with incidental music than my first show with Jeremy, “Touchable Dreams”. However the insight into Dickens is, I think, fascinating: It made me want to read more of his work.
The music was great fun to put together, and involves several of my favourite live looping pieces. One particular piece which was new to my repertoire was Phil Toms’ superb arrangement of James MacMillen’s “The Tryst”. As with so many of the pieces in “Touchable Dreams”, here the music and the words seem to fuse in a way which one could not have foretold. You can here the “The Tryst” played to a reading of the end of “Great Expectations” in the section of the video beginning at about 52’50″.
Bent and broken into a better shape: the magical storytelling of Charles Dickens
With Jeremy Harmer and Steve Bingham
This is a live recording of the event held at the BMA in London on 9 February 2012.
