Julia Raynham

Julia Rosina Raynham lives and works in Cape Town. Her acoustic compositions structure the sonic environments for her Live Art Performance works. Their roots are in Jazz, African idiomatic music and sacred songs, and branch out through collaborations with sound artists/engineers, into electronic music, synthesis and spatial audio.

Her Live Art Performance is itself a generative score, an interdisciplinary arrangement of sonic, visual, gestural, narrative and metaphysical material, creating an immersive architecture, designed to expand perception and adventures in consciousness.

elements of composition:

            sound: instrumental/vocal acoustic compositions, field recordings, historical audio archives, recorded    scripts, beats

            image: cinematic video, large scale photographic projection, computer generated imaging & animation, cinematography,

            body:   grammar, breath, movement, action, animation, choreography, dramaturgy, direction, transformation,

            words: script, libretto, texture, language, facts, fictions, fabulations, translation

            ritual:  occurrence-pattern-code-resonance, cartography, frequency-harmonics-ambience-reverberations, sensing the invisible, animist technologies,

Scores are tuned to the conceptual artistry of each production, its site specific context, African temporal-aesthetic-philosophical-political coordinates and fields of relations. Herein the internal properties of its substance, are as important as the external phenomena of the performance.  Productions include:

•  ‘21st Century Animal' (a ritual inscription on the edge of order)

• ‘change your perception at its social base’

•  ‘a new body will be assembled more brilliant than memory’

• ‘to be deprived of one’s nature is a terrible loss’

• ‘what turns the tide?’

Julia Rosina has composed music for string quartet, saxophone quartet, Big Band Jazz Orchestra and theatre productions; she has recorded  and produced audio books, such as Kulimtjie Nge (the songs & stories of the !Xun San Community from Southern Angola) and created audio archives from field research recordings in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Madagascar and Mozambique.

Her professional work as researcher, interdisciplinary artist and healer, brings her into collaboration with musicians, artists, dancers, film-makers, theatre-makers, architects, animators, scholars, civil society thoughtleaders, graphic designers, fashion designers and spirit mediums.