Beginning in late 2017, it became clear that a collaboration with City Recital Hall was likely.
Sonja Schebeck had already met Australian composer Ross Edwards in 2015 and asked for permission to create a multi-disciplinary (movement / circus arts) performance project using his music.
Knowing that Edwards celebrated his 75th birthday in 2018, The Freestyle Orchestra settled on his Maninyas violin concerto, which itself turned 30 that year.
The piece, long a favorite of Schebeck's, linked classical music to nature, ritual and movement, and was therefore an obvious choice.
Trial and error and physical experimentation was a significant part of the process. For the floor movements, over 100 separate moves were researched, attempted, categorized by viability. The possibilities selected through this process were then further filtered based on:
1. what the ensemble believed represented the music best
2. what could be linked together to form extended movement phrases reflecting Edwards' musical "cells" in combination as well as the overall compositional architecture of the concerto
3. what was viable for the stage and space and what could still seamlessly accommodate live instrumental performance.
