Alwynne Pritchard Composition, text, voice
Else Bø Piano
Marianne Baudouin Lie Cello
Thorolf Thuestad Live electronics and additional sound design Michele Braga Venice lockdown recordings
Heiner Müller and William Blake Additional texts
Margrethe Kvaran, Helena Nakstad, Agnes Severin, Ragne and Dulcie Pugh Children’s voices

Recorded live at Free Range Canterbury on May 16th, 2024.

Institutions of the Flesh is a music-theatre performance that explores relationships between the human voice, our bodies and the social structures in which we live. It's about how each and every breath we take connects us to the institutions of love, labour, devotion and dissent that have shaped human history.

Imagine that in every song we sing, the first human utterance can be heard. Feel the sensation of muscles contracting, a gasp of air being expelled, and imagine the thread that connects us right back to the first ever sounds we made – those primeval howls of pain, pleasure, anger, protestation, and maybe even love. Then slowly, slowly, slowly these howls, yelps, screams, and moans evolved into song.

Everything is motion, everything is connected, and everything is collated and organised in the body. The first breath is everything.

Funded by Trondheim Kommune and Norsk Kulturfond.