One of Sage Gateshead’s birthday secrets revealed as details of multi-media concert leak

On December 17^th, revellers heading to Sage Gateshead’s 10^th birthday party only know they’re in for a night full of surprises. Without spoiling things completely, we can now reveal that one of those surprises will be a thrilling multi-media performance in Hall One created by Novello Award-winning composer Jonathan Dove and the film director Philip Shotton, creator of iconic music videos for New Order and Happy Mondays.  The music will be performed by Royal Northern Sinfonia and several of Sage Gateshead’s excellent youth music ensembles. ‘Work in Progress’ follows the creation and first ten years of Sage Gateshead’s spectacular building and for Dove, who grew up as the son of architect parents, the idea of working with themes of construction in his music was extremely appealing. He says: ‘Donning a hard hat, I first came to visit the [Sage Gateshead] site in July 2000. I expected to see vast teams of workmen covering the site with ant-like orchestrated activity, like something out of Metropolis.  But the modern building-site is a very different place.  Huge prefabricated elements were lifted into place by crane: instead of an infernal machine, I saw a graceful ballet.  I realised that, instead of a collage of hammering and banging, a lot of my score would be a kind of dance-music’. ‘Work In Progress’ was originally premiered in Sage Gateshead’s opening season. For this new performance, Dove and Shotton have revisited the piece– ‘tightening it up and bringing music and image even more closely together, and including images from the first ten years of this magnificent building.’ Dove adds that, when beginning work on his composition, ‘I was creating the score for a film that didn’t yet exist, and these images suggested a possible narrative that echoed human history, beginning in the primeval swamp and arriving in the modern technological era’. The visual side of the spectacular performance will come from Newcastle-born director Philip Shotton. Shotton began his career with Tony Wilson’s legendary Factory Records in Manchester. There, he created many of the label’s music videos and even coined its era-defining term ‘Madchester’. Since then, he has worked extensively across performance, film and television, including directing and filming Timothy Spall in the Bafta nominated series Somewhere at Sea. Shotton also has a long-standing relationship with Newcastle’s Live Theatre (where he notably provided visuals for Michael Chaplin’s TYNE) and more recently, he acted as a producer on the 2014 feature film FRANK starring Michael Fassbender. His awards include The Silver Rose of Montreux. The original visual concept for ‘Work In Progress’ had been to use time-lapse footage of Sage Gateshead being built, with everything being shot from a single camera. However, production company FilmNova (who had been commissioned by Gateshead Council to film the construction) found time to stray from their brief, with their cameraman Peter Brown capturing exciting and dramatic silhouettes and close-ups as the building took shape’. Philip Shotton has taken this footage and combined it with film from several other sources, to create something brand new and visually arresting to accompany the narrative of Dove’s composition.