TRANSFIGURED   NIGHT

A Concept by Dumle Kogbara

Inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s  Verklarte  Nacht

Music, Poetry…….a Female Voice…..Love, Transcendence.

Humanitas-Culture welcomes you to, what hopefully  will be the start of a great adventure. The first incarnation of  the theme, Transfigured Night.

The Mystique, Glamour and Invisible Power of the Night

A Transfigured Night as a happening or an experience has been a long standing source of inspiration for me. the possibility and occurence of profound change across emotional,psychological and spiritual landscapes is a mine full of creative wealth.

Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht was inspired by a Richard Dehmel poem. This poem was part of a collectionby Dehmel, Weib und Welt(Woman and World). There is a strangeness, intensity, ambiguity, sadness and beauty. In Dehmel’s poem, what occurs between a man and a woman results in the night being transfigured for them.

Tonight is not an attempt to replicate the context of the Dehmel poem. rather, it is an encounter with musical and poetic moments in time, that explore how a night may be experienced as transfigured in a context ranging from the particular to the universal. a narrative structure may be sensed and adhered to . Or maybe something more fragmentary.

However, as all experience is ultimately personal, may you make this night your own. 

Dumle  Kogbara  (January 2010)

CHARMED  NIGHT

 On this anniversary of the German invasion of Poland that marked the start of World War 2, we celebrate the bicentenary of Poland’s greatest composer, Frederic Chopin. Let us reflect upon the creation and everlasting presence of beauty amidst the violence that also endures.

This is an evening of some Chopin piano music and selected poetry.There can be a narrative or not. I leave it to you to make this evening uniquely yours, and in the process may you just possibly be charmed.

Dumle Kogbara  ( 1 September 2010)

BEAUTIFUL  NIGHT

It is a tremendous  personal  pleasure to be in Chelsea, a spiritual home, for the final Humanitas-Culture event of 2010. It is also fitting  that  a  yearly  journey  that  began   with Transfigured  Night, ends  with Beautiful  Night. For, whatever  the  vicissitudes  across  our physical, emotional, psychological  and spiritual  landscapes, it  is  important  that  a  fundamental  sense   of  beauty  endures. Also  fitting  is  our  location  in  the  London  Sketch  Club.  The  events  of  the  last  year  have  been  sketches, which  can  be  viewed  as  works  complete  in  themselves  or  as  preparatory  studies  for  further  developed  works. Tonight’s  performnces  can  be  experienced  as  a  series  of  scenes  sketched  in  sound,  with  an  underlying  narrative  of  beauty  of   sound. As always, please  find  your  own  narrative  or  non  at  all,  by  making  this  night  uniquely  yours.

Dumle  Kogbara   (December 2010)