"It's Not Unusual": New dance piece comes to Sadler's Wells

I was thrilled to be invited by director/choreographer Vinicius Salles (Punchdrunk) to put together the music and sound design for his new dance-theatre piece IT'S NOT UNUSUAL, based on the music of Tom Jones and featuring the enormously talented young dancers of Jasmin Vardimon's JV2 Professional Development Programme.

Vini wanted to use Tom Jones's music as a way to explore masculinity in its various toxic forms, so my job was largely one of deconstruction and recontextualisation. The central scene depicted the action of the murder ballad "Delilah", with the violence amplified on stage and in the music. For this number I ended up stripping out Sir Tom's voice and reconstructing the rest of the orchestral accompaniment using virtual instruments, in order to give me full creative freedom to emphasise and re-work certain elements of the song for maximally disturbing effect.

For the show's final number, I created a mashup of five especially lascivious songs ("A Girl Like You", "My Kind of Girl", "Sex Bomb", "She's a Lady" and "Sugar Sugar") to really drive home the level of misogyny we often take for granted in music from this era. All of it was tied together with some eerie sound design and original music.