FOUR MANATEES: Backlight Dreams

Four Manatees will explore, expose, explode, merge and destroy boundaries between composition, improvisation, play and ritual. We will fool around with the idea of a “game”, or a “ritual” of a “piece of music” or “poetry” in five written pieces, each using a different compositional method and including elements of ritual and play. We will invite others to join us, and if you are in the audience you will become involved too.

Four Manatees are Dolly Turing and Verity Spott. They met five years ago in a whirl of free improvisation and live together in Brighton. They are in love and spend their time making and shaping dialogues, friendships, schemes, play, poetics. Both are musicians, using improvisation and composition. They play together using instruments, toys and electronics. Both are writers. Through different stresses and spheres their writing has in common queer love, transformation, bathos and a distrust for power games and established and arbitrary formalities.

Both hold a deep burning love for ritual, symbolism and process, a light hearted tendency to “make shit up” and a practical cynicism in the face of life and death.

Verity and Dolly have a fascination with exploring / exploding the boundaries between music/sound, magical ritual, poetry and play, using this as a tool. They have continually developed these ideas, for example composing a piece “Rocket Science” for Cage Rattling, a tribute to John Cage, Kings Palace, London; collaborating with each other and others on soundscapes, poetry and ritual at the poetry press’s “Veer to Athens” event last year, and creating a music/poetry/ritual for 2015’s Brighton Alternative Jazz Festival’s aftershow.