MainStage: Arms of Love

Buxtehude’s monumental meditation on suffering and the human body set with contemporary Indigenous dance, and a major new Australian work from Chris Williams.

The Song Company and contemporary Indigenous dance company Karul Projects reunite in a pageant of light and movement to Membra Jesu Nostri by Dieterich Buxtehude and I pray the sea by Australian composer Chris Williams, commissioned with funding from the Silo Collective and setting words from No Friend But the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani.

Williams’s flotilla of seven short fragments and one extended final movement is interspersed with Buxtehude’s intimate 17th-century cycle of seven cantatas on the physical and spiritual aspects of the Crucifixion. Co-curated/directed by Robert Macfarlane, with choreography by Thomas E.S. Kelly, against the background of an ongoing refugee crisis at home and abroad.