Live music and so much more return to the Grange festival with Precipice, an hour-long, open-air promenade piece, directed and written by Sinéad O’Neill, and given four performances a day, each to an audience of 60, over the course of the weekend. Depicting the rebirth of hope after crisis, it reminds us that the past has dealt us blows comparable to Covid-19, and that we have, in time, come through them.
In form, Precipice resembles a baroque pasticcio, fashioned from pre-existing material and drawing into itself opera, acrobatics, dance, choral and instrumental music. O’Neill links its sections with a discursive, incantatory narration that deploys images of birds as harbingers of death and renewal, spoken and sung by actor Tonderai Munyevu and soprano Héloïse Werner, who serve as our guides to the succession of scenes we encounter as we stroll through the Grange’s grounds.
O’Neill’s use of the differing landscapes is wonderfully original. Bird-like stilt walkers inhabit an Edenic formal garden, where Kiandra Howarth and Claire Barnett-Jones sing the Flower Duet from Delibes’ Lakmé. The sound of Bach’s Third Cello Suite, played by Tom Isaac, drifts towards us as the men from the Grange Festival Chorus process and dance with staves across distant meadows. And the doors of the festival theatre swing open to permit James Rutherford, replacing the indisposed John Tomlinson, to sing the Flieder Monologue from Wagner’s Meistersinger, accompanied by a chamber ensemble.
At the midpoint comes a reworking of Shobana Jeyasingh’s ballet Contagion, created in 2018 to mark the centenary of the flu pandemic after the first world war. Its rituals of sickness, loss and grief contrast with the finale – conducted by John Andrews, choreographed by Mthuthuzeli November and exuberantly performed in front of the Grange’s great Palladian facade – in which motets by Poulenc and Lili Boulanger accompany a series of formal dances that celebrate the eventual restoration of light and order. Nothing feels constricted or forced, despite physical distancing by both performers and audience, and the whole thing is a wonderful example of what the imagination can accomplish in difficult times.
