FRAGMENTS OF LOVE Helen Chadwick

Helen’s new solo show is centred around a series of songs and over dubbed sung improvisations based on fragments of love poems written by the Greek poet Sappho in versions by Anne Carson. One of the great Greek lyrists and few known female poets of the ancient world, Sappho was born some time between 630 and 612 BC and died around 570 BC. The bulk of her poetry, which was well-known and greatly admired through much of antiquity, has been lost, but her immense reputation has endured through surviving fragments. These songs were commissioned by the Getty Villa Los Angeles as part of a performance on Aphrodite. 

The performance is a meditation on the need to risk, improvise, be out of one’s comfort zone, in order to lead and create.