Set to soaring music featuring live synthesiser, theremin and violin, footage of the 1969 Apollo moon mission is repurposed to retell the narrative of Night Thoughts, a nine-poem cycle written by Edward Young in the 1740s. Night Voyager marries visuals from the NASA archives, capturing fearful but optimistic astronauts and their anxious loved ones left at home, with Young’s meditation on death – and speaks, too, of the possibility of cultural forgetting, as in Young’s poem, now scarcely remembered but called in its time “the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced”.
‘rather than a linear retelling, Orleans’ show focuses on the astronauts’ emotional journey and the wider meaning of the lunar trip’ The National
Ela Orleans performance of Night Voyager is supported by PRS Foundation’s Beyond Borders, a co-commissioning and touring programme run in partnership with Creative Scotland, Arts Council of Wales, Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Arts Council of Ireland /An Chomhairle Ealaíon. Presented in partnership with Moving On Music.
