Performers:  
Nigel Kellaway (actor/director)
Michael Bell (pianist)
Margaret Howard (violinist)
Catherine Tabrett (‘cellist)
Writers:
Virginia Baxter (NSW)
Jai McHenry (France)
Amanda Stewart (NSW)
Josephine Wilson (WA)
Composer: Nigel Kellaway (after J.S. Bach)
Lighting: Simon Wise

Premiered: 7th June 2007 at Performance Space at Carriageworks, Sydney

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Who is this man photographed recently on a beach nearby?  On approach he spoke a dialect of musical memes, adolescent delusions, TV sound grabs, punch-lines and pedagogy.  He hummed sound bytes from what a local lifesaver identified as Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

Developed over two years in Sydney, Perth, the south of France and Berlin, Sleepers Wake! Wachet Auf! is a unique and remarkable collaboration between Kellaway and four distinguished writers.  Composed, performed and directed by Kellaway, this most surprising performance finds a man at the edge of recollection, harbouring a nagging desire to connect with the present.  Adrift from cultural and historical specificities where nostalgia for Glenn Gould and Dean Martin washes up alongside political anxiety and an unreliable memory.

“The evocation of Bach’s variations provides a framework for a series of contrasting ruminations and outbursts on common motifs, such as amnesia, recollection and the self, without building up the expectation of a resolution or defining ‘plot’ event.  More importantly, it allows the nuances of the four writers, which is what sustains the work, to be intertwined without confusion …

The narrative types of the four authors range from … disjointed images to elegant short stories, inner self-examination and occasional sitcom-style outbursts of emotion … Though taking postmodern liberties, the work as a whole is written with understanding and reverence, using Bach’s very intervals and counterpoint as discreet metaphors”

Peter McCallum,  Sydney Morning Herald, April 4, 2006

“I was moved by Sleepers Wake!  There was a sense of inevitability about it all, the pathos in Nigel’s not knowing but continued attempts at being.  The writers cleverly use memory to ask bigger questions around what all of this “presence” – this “Nigel Kellaway Hour” – is really about …

The skill in Kellaway’s performance is in his exquisite command not only of text, timing and audience, but in his obvious joy in knowing exactly what we do not.  Kellaway understands the fickle nature of memory, which is why he disappears before our eyes a little too quickly.  We are left with a trace of a gesture, the afterglow of human sentiment, an energy that lingers alongside what has already become just a distant memory of music.”

Bryoni Trezise,  REALTIME, Aug-Sep, 2007