Koyaanisqatsi

Philip Glass's original score performed live to Godfrey Reggio's film.
Brighton Festival Exclusive

The 1982 world premiere of Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass's groundbreaking collaboration Koyaanisqatsi was a milestone in movie making history. Now, exclusively for Brighton Festival, Philip Glass leads his own ensembleas they perform the composer's original score live to this cult film classic.

'Koyaanisqatsi' - the only textual reference in Reggio's non-narrative, non-linear audiovisual tone poem - means 'life out of balance' in the Hopi Indian dialect. Harmony and discord - both environmental and mechanistic - are the film's underlying themes, played out in a pulsing stream of timelapse and slow motion photography. From the desert landscape of Monument Valley to abandoned tenements in the South Bronx; from the natural world to rampant technology, the images are framed and reframed in striking juxtapositions. Philip Glass's reiterative, hypnotic score is the perfect match for Reggio's moving meditation, his signature 'minimalist' themes cast here in epic orchestral soundscapes.

As the accelerating pace of modernity puts ever-greater strain on the natural world and leads us towards an environmental tipping point, Koyaanisqatsi's brave new vision seems more prescient and contemporary than ever.

'Prepare yourself for kaleidoscopic beauty.'
Wired

'The range of instrumental colours is astonishing.'
New York Times