The Alonetimes

The Alonetimes comes to the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities on Monday 19 October, a new music-theatre work by Oxford-based composers Jennifer Walshe and Philip Venables. It was commissioned by the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain and executive produced by Festival Musica Strasbourg.

They describe it as a fragmented archaeology of personal stories, and that's a fair way to put it. Six multi-skilled performers slip between different voices and lives throughout the piece: a Bronze Age druid, a Gen Z woman, a dancer in 1980s New York, and figures seen through a VR headset. One of those figures is a trash-talking, chain-vaping druid from 3300 BC. It works like a contemporary madrigal, with voices circulating, overlapping and splitting across the stage.

Underneath the jumping timelines, Walshe and Venables are looking at loneliness—the kind they say is heightened by our constant digital presence and intensified by the pandemic and other crises. It's a theme that runs through the whole thing, from the distant past to the near future.

The cast brings together a wide range of instruments and voices: Andreas Borregaard on accordion, Diamanda La Berge Dramm on violin, Loré Lixenberg and Oskar McCarthy on voice, Vanessa Porter on percussion, and Adam Starkie on bass clarinet. Aedín Cosgrove handles light and costumes, Bryan Burroughs takes care of movement dramaturgy, Romain Muller is on sound, and Ragnar Árni Ólafsson is on video. Both Walshe and Venables wrote and directed the piece.

It runs about 70 minutes in English with no interval, and it's recommended from age 15. The two composers have also written operas, including We are the lucky ones and Mars, both from 2025.