The Brighton Festival has signed up Brian Eno – the pop musician and record producer – for next year.
Eno, 61, the former Roxy Music keyboard player, is to be the guest curator of the 44th Brighton Festival.
He will present his work 77 Million Paintings, an installation consisting of a slowly evolving, self-generating, sound and image-scape, according to The Guardian.
It said that the work was premiered in Tokyo in 2006 but had never been seen on a large scale in Britain – and that Eno calls the piece “visual music”.
Eno is quoted by The Guardian as saying: “I am delighted to be part of a festival which has consistently placed itself at the cutting edge of the creative arts in Britain.
“I hope to be able to show some recent work that has not yet been seen in this country and also to develop new works especially for the festival.
“I would like this festival to provoke, entertain and hopefully to start some social conversations which will persist long after it has finished.”
Fans of Eno’s music can look forward to hearing his album Apollo performed live by the new music group Icebreaker. It will be performed with NASA footage of an Apollo mission landing on the Moon as the visual backdrop.
Andrew Comben, the chief executive of Brighton Festival, said: “We are showing the work in a deconsecrated church. The visuals have a kind of stained-glass effect.
“Wherever it has been shown, people have queued to see it and have stayed inside it for hours. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful work.”
The choreographer Hofesh Shechter, whose company is based in Brighton, will premiere his first full-scale work at the festival, which runs from Saturday 1 May to Sunday 23 May 2010. The company is looking for two female dancers, although anyone hoping to audition will have to travel to Lyon in France or Los Angeles in the USA.
And dreamthinkspeak, the Brighton-based performance artists, will create an immersive installation on a large scale in a disused department store in the centre of Brighton. The work, loosely based on The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov and marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, will, said Comben, dwell on environmental issues, climate change and 21st century Russia.
