Tom Parkinson
Music, sound and performance


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I am a composer, musician and sound designer.

The vast majority of my work is with theatre and dance. This ranges from ephemeral tiny things for one person at a time, to large-scale international touring productions.

Creative highlights of the last couple of years include I'm A Phoenix, Bitch with Bryony Kimmings - which toured the UK and Australia; De Voorlopers and We Are in Trouble with Ivgi&Greben in Holland; Super Duper Close Up with Made in China; Ur by Sulayman Al Bassam - which opened at Residenz, Munich and the National Theatre of Tunisia; making a box of musical after-dinner experiments; and filming an as-yet unfinished dance movie with Caroline Williams, Jonathan Goddard and Christina Hardinge.

2020 was shaping up to be another vintage year full of new shows and new collaborators across the world. Aside from a couple of web-based projects, however, everything ground to a miserable halt in March. Crushingly, when lockdown kicked in we were days away from opening a new songified version of Hedda Gabler by Jen Hayes, performed by the incredible David Hoyle in Liverpool AND In Service by Keren Levi in Sweden, performed by Norrdans.

One late blast of sunshine has been the latest installment of Departing Landscapes a profoundly affecting solo by Levi which opened in Amsterdam in October and has further dates booked in Germany. Other than that, 2020 has reduced the kind of art-making I love most to swapping speculative fantasies via whatsapp.

However, I've been kept occupied by getting an actual job for the first time since I got fired from the ice-cream shop in Amsterdam in 2001: last summer, I was appointed 'Lecturer in Digital Composition' at Royal Holloway. And we moved to Liverpool. And we got a dog.

Lastly, after an extraordinary run of international partnerships, including with The National Dance Company of Korea, Scottish Ballet, and Prague Chamer Ballet, my long-term collaborators Ivgi&Greben have finally secured the funding to create their own dance company in Leeuwarden (Holland). Pandemic permitting, we will start touring work from summer 2021.

Aside from working with other people in rooms, I make musical experiments and I occasionally write about music, sound-technologies and theatre. Even more occasionally, I make commercial music. In 2019, I finished a PhD in composition (also at Royal Holloway).

Whatever has brought you here, I'd love to talk about it.