It was my honour to be invited to play the Midsummer Solstice in the beautiful Pirita Cloister ruins in Tallinn, Estonia. I can barely imagine a more suitable location to dance in tribute to the sun.
An open sky, surrounded by the ruined medieval walls: a place to stand with the movements of the past, and evoke them to dance into the future with us.
The perfect starting point for this musical journey was a psalm by Hildegard von Bingen, which I imagine to have been sung here since the cloister opened in 1407: Spiritus Sanctus Vivificans, a song that seems as much an ode to the sun as anything else. From there I wove together the old and the new from all the far flung reaches of the world, following the the lines of the beginning:
The Holy Spirit: living and life-giving,
the life that’s all things moving,
the root in all created being:
of filth and muck it washes all things clean—
out-scrubbing guilty staining, its balm our wounds constraining—
and so its life with praise is shining,
rousing and reviving
all.
Check here for some more pictures of the event: Facebook photo album