How are teacups and cheese graters related to grand pianos and saxophones? How many people get stuck in a kitchen routine while their creative lives develop only in their dreams?
During lockdown the challenge was to think creatively even while constrained to live very domestically, so I recorded a group of sounds from my kitchen and sampled them, turning a midi keyboard into my own kitchen synthesizer, and combining it with two instruments I play, piano and saxophone. The result is “Teatime! (Did you think I was here to make the tea?)”
There is an autobiographical element at play in this piece. The day after my father died my mother suddenly started talking openly about kitchen desperation. She spoke for a whole generation of women who lived as newlyweds in 1950s Britain. This piece is for all of them.
Teatime! was part of the programme of MicroActs 8 on Thursday 24 June 2021 at Hotel Elephant, London, and has since been screened at Darkroom Festival (London), Façade Video Festival (Plovdiv, Bulgaria) and World Cinema Carnaval (Calcultta) in 2022 and Grand Rapids Feminist Film Festival in 2024.
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