FIGURE and Alkanna Graeca present MOURN, a musical-theatrical exploration of the experience of loss through the rituals of the Balkans and the music of 17th century Italy. The performance examines the universal experience of losing a loved one, and the ways we come to terms with death. Through music and song, unfolding in a series of poetic scenes inspired by ancient funeral traditions kept alive in the Balkans and reimagined in Italy, MOURN asks how we say farewell to those we love most.

In Renaissance Italy, composers drew on Ancient Greek tragedy to invent a new declamatory style that sits between speech and song. The funeral laments that were woven into those dramas became central to early opera, and the style spread across Europe. The “lament bass” - a repeating, descending four-note line - was used in Germany by Biber, in France by Lully and, nearly 1000 miles away, in England by Purcell in Dido’s Lament. Had those Italian composers crossed the Adriatic Sea to the Balkans, they would have found the mourning traditions which were immortalised in Ancient Greek tragedy still in practice, forming an unbroken lineage with the past. There the funeral lament, sung rather than spoken, endured as part of everyday life - delivered outward and upward to a community of the living, the dead, and the divine.

Historically informed performance ensemble FIGURE has been praised in The Times for its “high-risk, high-reward” projects, and in The Guardian as musically “unequivocally impressive, its sound invigorating, its commitment absolute”. Alkanna Graeca is a vocal trio blending raw folk traditions from the Balkans, Mediterranean, and Black Sea with free improvisation, whose “spine-tingling harmonies and dissonances have reinvented ancient polyphony for a contemporary audience”. MOURN places the imagined tradition of Western Europe and the living tradition of the Balkans in dialogue, reconstructing a ritual of grief.

Photo Credit: "Nyx (the night)," 2019. Photographer: Ioanna Sakellaraki