April 13, 2016
I’m thrilled to announce the upcoming international tour of the multi-media opera LUMINOSITY: THE PASSIONS OF MARIE CURIE, a collaboration composed byPamela Madsen with my site-specific video and image installations and projections, which I created at the labs of Marie Curie in Paris. Luminosity: The Passions of Marie Curie is a multi-media opera about the passions of the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie, the discover of Radium for voices, flute, percussion, piano, electronics and electronics-commissioned and premiered in part by soundSCAPE, Tony Arnold, soprano and Either/OR Ensemble, composed by Pamela Madsen with projected images and video Quintan Ana Wikswo. The opera explores the concept of the invisible in life and death.
READ MORE: http://www.quintanwikswo.com/projects/luminosity-the-passions-of-marie-curie/
The opera will be premiered on Friday, April 16 by Nicholas Isherwood at California State University, Fullerton, before moving on to Los Angeles, Italy, Germany, Philadelphia, and New Zealand…dates and venues to follow soon!
Partners include Festpiel, Tolstefanz, Germany;Conservatorio, Cuneo, Italy; University of Auckland, New Zealand; CSUF, Fullerton, USA, CSULA, Los Angeles, USA, and Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, USA.
Artist’s Notes / Quintan Ana Wikswo:
When composer Pamela Madsen asked me to create the films for her new opera, I began a journey that led me through foggy November days in the Paris laboratories and gardens of Marie Curie. There is a complexity in being in her laboratory – it’s a deeply nourishing and somehow addictive experience to spend these days so near to a woman whose ideas triumphed over such absurdly enormous barricades of scientific and societal ignorance. Amidst her things, amidst her kind of revolution, there is a focused ferocity that’s still palpable. It felt like her own force of will gifted upon upon a hostile, frightened, intimidated and ignorant society.
Her laboratories are located a few blocks from the Sorbonne and the Pantheon and Luxembourg Gardens, on the left bank of Paris. Walking over to the Curie Institute, the buildings become lower and smaller, the streets less grand, the walkways more modest. There is more purposefulness and less posturing. There are fewer signs on the walls testifying to liberty and greatness and revolution, and more postings of servicable directions to physics and chemistry facilities.
Around the corner, and her laboratories are tucked behind a wrought iron fence with climbing roses, and they are three low-slung, pale brick buildings – no marble columns here. It is the state school versus the private ivy league. It is the triumph of the underdog: what can be done, at great personal cost, making so much from so little.
For all of us who follow our passion amidst despair about the resources at our fingertips – Marie Curie is the icon to study. Underestimated, with a late start, unevenly educated, working as a nanny until her mid-twenties, an awkward yet self-possessed immigrant and foreigner on French soil, an interloper at every stage of French male scientific culture, an accidentally transgressive individual far beyond the strictures of her era, indominitable…she still lives on as one of the foremost visionaries in human civilization.
Composer’s Notes:
Luminosity: The Passions of Marie Curie
Pamela Madsen
Pierre’s Dissertation on Crystals (2016)
Luminosity: The Passions of Marie Curie is a multi-media opera about the passions of the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie, the discover of Radium for voices, flute, percussion, piano, electronics and electronics-commissioned and premiered in part by soundSCAPE, Tony Arnold, soprano and Either/OR Ensemble, composed by Pamela Madsen with projected images and video Quintan Ana Wikswo. The opera explores the concept of the invisible in life and death. This opera ponders the ephemeral fleeting nature of things beyond one’s grasp-That which is beyond seeing, but is felt, and focuses on the question posed by Marie Curie: “Are you there?” This quest for the invisible was at the heart of Marie and Pierre Curie’s work–in their discovery of radium, radioactivity, and their exploration of spiritualism, and the quest of quantify life beyond death. From Poland to Paris, a visionary young chemist transcends the frontiers of her era, redefining physics, chemistry, and the role of women in science and society. Her pursuit of radioactive elements brings her as close as humanly possible to both creation and destruction – a legacy of her work that continues to resounds across time and space.
Pierre’s Dissertation on Crystals occurs at the beginning of the opera—when Marie Curie first appears in the Curie lab and encounters Pierre Curie, deep in thought, uttering the text of his Doctoral Thesis: Propriétés magnétiques des corps à diverses temperatures (Curie’s dissertation, 1895). For the libretto for the text of this work, I used key word from his thesis—compression of crystals in Piezoelectricity, ferromagnetism, paramagnetism, diamagnetism and his the effect of temperature on magnetic fields, the Curie law, scale, constant, and Curie point and extraterrestrial magnetic fields. At the end of Pierre’s Aria, he becomes aware that Marie Curie is in the room, and this leads him to the discovery of the Curie Dissymmetry Principle-a physical effect of a dissymmetry in a gravitational field. For the projected images and sounds, I worked directly at the Curie Lab, and amongst the streets where the Curie’s lived in Paris. Quintan Ana Wikswo’s installations of projected film, video and photography explore the chemistries of expired and altered film stocks, infrared, and alternative optics and lenses. For the audio for the electronics, I used actual sounds of piezoelectricity from crystals, and sounds of electricity-ominous Geiger counters predicting the plight of radiation poisoning. The electronics are fixed media with projected images/video playback, images by Quintan Ana Wikswo, electronics by Pamela Madsen/ Eric Dries.