Concerted Efforts

How The Chinese Room rebuilt DEAR ESTHER for a live tour

- Philippa Warr

The Chinese Room cofounder and composer Jessica Curry summarizes her initial pitch for a live performance of Dear Esther in a typically humorous manner: “I’ve had this possibly really bad and commercially unviable idea—how would you feel about it?!” She was speaking with the Barbican’s Contemporary Music Programmer, Chris Sharp.

The idea came during a Film, Archive, and Music Lab (FAMLAB) week Curry was attending. “They were talking about composers and how they work with silent film in terms of putting that into a concert experience,” she says. She began to ponder that in relation to her expertize in video game music.

Sharp has previously summed up the Barbican’s work as ‘Slightly Insane Ideas Made Reality’, so Curry’s proposal would seem a perfect fit for that remit. “They were amazing from start to finish,” she says of the Barbican. “They were really creatively on board with it, but also incredibly practical, because what we quickly discovered is that it was technically really challenging.”