Pendry/Lemur Enemy of the People (2020)

Actor, performance artist and playwright Kate Pendry  and composer-performers LEMUR collaborated in the impromptu event KOLLISJON, at Arendalsuka 2016, revealing a shared concern for the role of art production in todays political climate. Furthermore, a strong dedication to artistic craftmanship was encountered, a reliance of the direct bodily, non-digital presence of live performers. Together they have started a process to develop a new form of instrumental music drama,  creating conditions for a hybrid form between the directness of an improvised concert and the premeditation of a dramatic text.

Enemy of the people
Lemur/Pendry’s  Enemy Of The People seeks to include and immerse the audience in the characters’ emotional landscape and ideological battlefield. We plumb the strata of subtext by acknowledging it. What lies beneath.

The performance is a meditation on the themes found in Enemy Of The People. We allow the essential conflicts in the play to manifest and play out – to be drawn out through the realtime interaction with the instruments. We explore the strange loops of feed-in and feed-back where the artists are tuning into each others sounds, drawing out, expanding upon, feeding each other as they respond to each other. We consider the problematic of intellectual discourse in political plays;  how the fourth wall can become sometimes opaque – even impenetrable. The audience has heard it all before …  if not on stage then in the national and international discourses that abound. We’ve become adept at filtering out, drawing lines, not listening – because it’s simply too exhausting to listen.