Iva Davies
Iva Davies brings rock-band energy and synthesizer colour to the ballet stage. With Icehouse he scored Boxes and Berlin for the Sydney Dance Company, night-club textures and circus swagger sitting beside big synthetic strings.
Those dance scores sit beside a long career as Icehouse’s singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, and as a screen composer. On the Murphy retrospective, No Promises from Boxes is lean rock theatre; the Berlin excerpts open into synthesised string wash, piano improvisation and circus-band swagger. Davies has long moved between studio electronics, woodwind colour and popular song, writing for film and television as readily as for the stage. The dance collaborations with Robert Kretschmer and Max Lambert show how that mix serves movement: clear pulse, theatrical atmosphere, and a band sound that does not pretend to be an orchestra.
Compositions by Iva Davies appear on
Graeme Murphy's Body of Work: A Retrospective
For 25 years the Sydney Dance Company under Graeme Murphy dominated Australian dance. Murphy made it a mission to commission new Australian scores; this disc gathers some of the most successful, issued to mark a national tour celebrating his work.
Composer: Composed By