June Butler takes a trip to the National Concert Hall for Night Voyager from composer and audio-visual artist Ela Orleans.
Born in Oświęcim, Poland, Ela Orleans is a visionary, an artist, creator of worlds, multi-instrumentalist, composer and singer. She has toured extensively throughout the UK, Europe, United States and Canada with her most recent show, Night Voyager, held in the National Concert Hall, Dublin, Ireland.
Venues such as MoMA PS1, New York, MoCA Massachusetts, the Venice Biennale, and TATE Britain can all lay claim to hosting her exhibits. Orleans’ musical and artistic output is extensive, having released both albums and composed scores for television and film soundtracks, in addition to theatrical and operatic oeuvres. In 2022, Orleans graduated with a PhD in Music from the University of Glasgow. At the same time, Orleans was awarded a year-long residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts while employed on her latest project, La Nuit Dorée. Orleans divides her living and working schedule between Glasgow, Paris, and Warsaw.
As a solo artist, Ela Orleans, has truly transcended with her utterly mesmerising audiovisual piece Night Voyager. The opus is compiled of NASA Archive footage of the Apollo programme covering a period of 14 years between 1961 to 1975. Videos are intersected with quotes from the poems of Edward Young dating back to the 1740s – while Young’s masterpiece has sadly fallen from popularity, it was nonetheless hailed as the grandest poetry ever written in James Boswell’s 1791 book on The Life of Samuel Johnson. Originally titled The Complaint or Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality, Young’s piece was devised to best describe his laments on the death of his wife and friends, coupled with musings about the human condition and its fragilities. In her much-lauded essay titled Worldliness and Other-Worldliness, George Eliot asserted that while Young did not coin the term ‘melancholy and moonlight’, he did much to insert the theme into salon discussions by fashionable society. The third and last song from the piece, featured The More Loving One by W.H. Auden but a greater percentage contained work by Edward Young.
By conjoining the poetry of Young with NASA footage, Orleans has created a succession of powerful metaphors, provoking a commanding statement on seizing the moment and making it pivotal. Touching on a mental picture founded by Young, and twinning it with word and illustration, Orleans draws comparisons between the work of a poet in 1742 and the Apollo mission that commenced in 1961, over two-hundred years later. These lines, written in the eighteenth century, hold an unnerving, prescient sway over a leap of faith, a vault into alien territory, and what appears to be an eerie forecast of later events. Aurally overlaid with the images, Orleans uses synthesizer and theremin, while also live-sampling and layering MIDI instrumentation using her voice and playing the violin. In doing so, she has created a vibrant wall of resonance, a ‘rich, immersive, soundscape’ as Ela herself terms it. And it is so very beautiful – captivating, dreamy, soulful, and deeply moving. Her goal, she stated, was to spotlight the immense behind-the-scenes production leading up to the moon-landing, and, more adroitly on the moral value of such a triumph.
In the early years of the space programme, there were fears of the unfamiliar. Those first astronauts (and their families) were facing the unknown. There were no guarantees of return to Earth once rocketed into the stratosphere and first forays in uncharted territory were always going to be viewed with trepidation. On 27th January1967, during a rehearsal launch, fire broke out in the Apollo 1 cockpit killing Command Pilot Gus Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White, and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee. As Orleans’ score ebbs and swells, Young’s words underscore the tragedy of losing these brave men with film and music portraying a nation’s grief. Susan Bowman, wife of Command Pilot Frank Bowman, who led the first trip in Apollo 8 to circumnavigate the moon, is filmed watching television in her living room, hoping and praying her husband would make it back alive as the module returned from its mission. Ticker-tape parades show the joy of Americans witnessing one of the most momentous events to ever occur in the history of our planet. On 25th May 1961, President John F. Kennedy gave a rousing speech to Congress extolling the daring and ambitious goal of safely sending a man to the Moon – scenes of the address show an audience overwhelmed with the possibilities that lay ahead, rising to their feet in tumultuous applause.
Propelled (literally), to our limits and beyond, where explorers show that bravery is within our grasp, Ela Orleans has gathered those waiting crowds into a unique journey and a suspension of belief into a realm afar. Night Voyager is more than simply an experience, a moment in time, it is the visual, poetic, and musical epicentre of human endeavour.
Commissioned by Cryptic Glasgow, Night Voyager was first presented at Sonica, Glasgow City in 2019. With the Covid19 pandemic causing an extended break from touring, a programme called PRS Foundation Beyond Borders made it possible for the piece to be resurrected and shown in distinguished galleries throughout Canada, Europe and the US.
Executive Producer: Guy Madden. Produced and co-directed by Stuart MacLean. Archive Producer (NASA Archives), Stephen Slater. Composed, performed and directed by Ela Orleans.
Night Voyager took place on 17th October 2024.
