Enemy of the People

A technologically challenged music drama for improvising actor, ensemble and live processing.

Enemy of the people is a new performance by LEMUR and actor/playwright Kate Pendry, cutting through Ibsens text with the ensembles own sounds, lines and music whilst struggeling to remember the script and score of a well known american shark movie and fragments of Grieg’s cello sonata. The romantic celebration of truth against authority is pitted against the ramblings of mass murdering cult leader Jim Jones. The result is instantly contemporary and heartbreaking political.

The project welcomes an emotional landscape and an ideological minefield: presenting a politically relevant performance in the intersection between music and theatre borrowing from the direct presence of an improvised concert and the carefully selected direction of a theatrical text.

Almost 140 years after Ibsen wrote the play, Pendry + LEMUR use his themes and conflicts as a starting point to explore if and how the paradox between the direct meaning of the word, together with the abstract music can answer the problems we face today, even though the Norwegian relationship with our national poet seems to be worn.