Olivia Bell and Lydia Kenny to Present BEAT – A Verbatim Song Cycle at Canal Cafe Theatre
BEAT is a bold new verbatim song cycle for saxophone, bass clarinet, harp, voice and electronics.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Jan. 02, 2026
What if you didn’t need a beating heart to be alive? This is the question that composer-saxophonist Lydia Kenny and librettist-singer Olivia Bell pose in BEAT, a bold new verbatim song cycle for saxophone, bass clarinet, harp, voice and electronics. Blending electro-acoustic sound with a libretto stitched from first-hand interviews and a vast array of documentary sources, from medieval potions to last rites, BEAT probes the edges of life, death and the strange pulse that binds us together.
The work draws on an eclectic archive: from newspaper cuttings to NHS leaflets on leeches, Instagram callouts, overheard conversations on late-night trains and TED talks on frozen frogs. Kenny and Bell also weave in moving testimony from those who work in end-of-life care and sacred texts from across multiple faith traditions, exploring how different cultures mark the transition between presence and absence, body and spirit, heartbeat and silence.
Humorous, unsettling, funky and deeply human, BEAT revels in the slippery territory between the medical and the mystical, the scientific and the surreal. Through its collage of voices - living, remembered, archived and overheard - it unpicks our assumptions about what it means to be alive and how we reach for one another when the end comes close. This is documentary music-theatre with a pulse of its own. The performance will take place on Tuesday 27th January at 7:30pm.
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