Ela Orleans

Glasgow and Paris based Polish composer and audio-visual artist Ela Orleans performs her mesmerising Night Voyager. Set to soaring music featuring live synthesiser, theremin, vocals and violin, Night Voyager features NASA archive footage of the 1969 Apollo moon mission, matching the astronauts’ emotional journey with fragments of Night Thoughts a collection of extended poetic mediations written by Edward Young in 1742.. Rather than a linear re-telling, Orleans performance focuses on the wider meaning of the lunar trip and Young’s exploration of mortality, time and human folly. Although now scarcely remembered, Night Thoughts was called in its time ‘the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced’.

“Rather than a linear retelling, Orleans’s show focuses on the astronauts’ emotional journey and the wider meaning of the lunar trip.” The National