Creative Arts Review – Björk’s Cornucopia an interdisciplinary audio-visual feast

Recently, I went to see the film version of Björk’s live show Cornucopia. Showing in cinemas worldwide for a limited time in May. Between 2019 and 2023, Björk toured this immersive audio-visual concert experience around the world, and it has been translated into a filmic experience, shown at cinemas so that a wider audience can see this interdisciplinary work.

Björk creatively collaborates with practitioners across a range of disciplines: costume design, dance, singing, instruments (including a magnetic harp, a circular flute, an aluphone, and a reverb chamber) digitally created and moving visuals, and stage-set design. The show also brings together some of her Icelandic influences including the Hamrahlid Choir. These elements are skillfully curated to create an interdisciplinary immersive experience.  This stands as an interesting example and combination of some of the disciplines offered within the Creative Arts Degree.

Bjork appears on stage wearing a bird wing mask which highlights her mouth and eyes throughout the performance. The layered and ruched fabric of her costume picks up the smallest of movements her body echoing the flow and movement of the digital display projected on the screen behind and infront and around as the images project forward on the tasselled curtains on stage, like a contemporary magic lantern effect. The visuals are digital hybrid creatures and organisms, programmed to respond to the sound produced on stage. Here bodies become birds; become flowers; become fungi. As Björk cries out in her characteristic narrowly melodic enunciated sound, plants unfurl in response. Beneath her, several women play on a suspended circular flute and the sounds appear to make fungal spores twitch. 

The visuals at times had resonances with other works: the television series The Last of Us where humans become fungus; Gerald Scarfe’s surreal animation of plants intertwining made for Pink Floyd; Midsummer Night’s Dream style costumes work by the musicians to name but a few.

She calls to the audience to imagine a future where humans, nature, and technology can co-exist and co-operate. This is a utopia she wants the audience to imagine and move toward. Yet there is also a visceral human and bodily sense to the work, an acceptance of love, grief, sensuality, sexuality and the flaws of humanity. 

The layering of sound, both melodic and at times jarring, with both the physical presence of the stage set, musicians, choir and moving digital visuals is at times an utterly overwhelming sensory experience. 

Sometimes as with other filmed performances of live events the camera shifts position too many times, and cuts to different angles over and over at dizzying speed. For me this slightly disrupts my sense of immersion, but I was glad to have the opportunity to catch a glimpse of what the live experience might have been like. It has certainly made me want to dust off my old 90’s vinyl records of her early work to listen again. 

Check out the website for any final dates to see the film of this concert.