standard candle

Standard Candle is a commissioned stagework for eighteen performers by Adelina Larsson and Anthony Coxeter. 

 

Across three movements, the work introduces us to the various figures of an unnamed remote scientific outpost whose preparations for an upcoming expedition - the sending up of a new ‘standard candle’ - leaves some of them morally and psychologically unwilling to undertake it. 

 

Accompanied by the haunting compositions of Henry Kaiser (from Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World) and Bangladeshi-Australian composer Shoeb Ahmed, Standard Candle is a meditation on the absurdities and costs of the quest for knowledge. It also quietly stages an argument for the role of the arts in attempts to make sense of our place and scale in the cosmos, particularly in seeing the modern scientific impulse together with human complexity.