My brother Francis composed Urdance — 'a ballet of the mind' — and never recorded it. After he died, I found the score in a mouse-eaten bag in his garage. This is the thread where I chart the attempt to bring the work back to life, and where I keep running into the real difficulty: how do you collaborate with the dead? It's the most personal thing here, and the least resolved.
While clearing my late brother Francis's chaotic house, I hunted for any surviving trace of Urdance — a 1987 synthesiser-and-orchestra work, never studio-recorded, that the two had discussed resurrecting together. Part eulogy, part detective story, this opens a series on reviving the piece, and on the strange question at its heart: how do you collaborate with the dead?
Last week Urdance took its first public step back into the world in decades, performed at the CoSTAR LiveLab launch with live dancers, their motion-capture avatars, and a 28-speaker ambisonic mix. This is my reflection on a deliberately unfinished first outing — exhilarating, imperfect, and revealing — and on what it taught me about where my late brother's living composition might go next.
Reviving Urdance was never going to be a simple matter of interpretation. Drawing on Francis's own words about the piece's unfinished, ever-shifting nature, I weigh the creative licence he left me against the practical void of time and budget — and the daunting task of turning a hand-written score into something living and breathing. It's a story of digital transcription, generous collaborators, and the question of whether samples can ever sound truly alive.
The breakthrough on Urdance came from an unlikely source: Jack Wingad, a sound editor at our post-production house who, never having known Francis, took on the piece between jobs. In this post I let Jack describe his own approach, and reflect on what it means to honour Francis's 'no barriers' spirit — through Nick Cave's idea of vulnerability — by being brave enough to break the work creatively rather than slavishly second-guess a dead composer's intentions.
Twenty years ago a collaboration with Phoenix Dance Theatre changed the course of my life, setting me on a path through interactive art and into founding ViridianFX. Last Thursday I returned to their company for a motion-capture session — and the music was Urdance, my late brother's experimental 1987 work, reborn for the launch of CoStar Live Lab. Here I trace the echoes across time that brought me back to where I began.