An installation by The Brothers Quay, co-commissioned by Portland Green Cultural Projects and Opera North. The single screen film was distributed by Portland Green Cultural Projects Ltd.

Eurydice… She, So Beloved
2008
The Brothers Quay
11’00”
4:3 aspect ratio
HDV

Eurydice… She, So Beloved is a dance/experimental film from the Quay Brothers co-commissioned by Opera North Projects and Capture, a commissioning scheme managed by Portland Green Cultural Projects.

Eurydice… She, So Beloved explores themes in Rilke’s poem: ‘Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes’. The narrative is concerned with the mental and physical experience of Eurydice while she awaits rescue in the underworld, and is expressed through dance, drama and music.

Filmed at Sands studios, London. The film was commissioned as part of an installation which was first shown at Leeds City Art Gallery in 2008 as a response to and celebration of the 400th anniversary of Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo. The installation also includes an optical box and an anamorphic painting.

The Quay Brothers
Stephen and Timothy Quay, identical twins, were born in Norristown, near Philadelphia, in 1947. After graduating in 1969 from the Philadelphia College of Art, where they studied illustration and graphics, they won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, London. At the School of Film and Television they made their first short films (mostly lost), and met fellow student Keith Griffiths, who first collaborated with them on Nocturna Artificialia (1979), funded by the BFI Production Board. Working together as Koninck Studios, with Griffiths producing, the Quays have maintained a steady output of surreal and fastidious puppet animation films, supplemented by design work for opera, theatre and ballet. To help finance their avant-garde projects they have also worked on TV commercials, channel identification footage, and numerous music videos, including the Stille Nacht series, and, less characteristically, Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer.