Simon Waters

Simon Waters is a musician: a composer, improviser and performer who established his career in collaborations with choreographers and contemporary dance companies. His electroacoustic work Dangerous Liaisons (1983) was choreographed by Richard Alston for Ballet Rambert, and remained in their repertoire for more than three years – being performed worldwide. He made other work for Rambert, and was commissioned by Matthew Bourne’s first dance company, Adventures in Motion Pictures, also making works for Covent Garden’s Garden Venture, marionettist Stephen Mottram, and pioneering multimedia theatre company Moving Being. He performed with numerous physical theatre companies, curated and directed the Sonic Arts concert programme in Norwich from 1994-2012, has curated for Ultima Festival Oslo and Fylkingen Stockholm, and was from 2013-18 director of Sonorities Festival Belfast. An early interest in sound installations, sparked by the work of Richard Long was revived by Proxemics: The World is a Deaf Machine (2006), a multi-channel sound installation commissioned by the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, in response to the sculpture of Ian Tyson and the architecture of Denys Lasdun and Norman Foster. His more recent work includes Longer to write than to speak; longer to think than to write (2016), a 12-channel sound installation in response to the poetry of Maria McManus, and Line, a performance-installation premiered at Turner Contemporary, Margate in 2018.