The Sad Lament Of Pecos Bill On The Eve Of Killing His Wife

Can a legend die? Or worse, slowly fade away into irrelevance?

Byron Coll - Pecos Bill
Colleen Davis - Slue-Foot Sue
Phil Dryson - guitar, saw
Chris O’Connor - percussion
Tom Rodwell - guitar
Robin Kydd - installation art
Tim Bell - lighting design
By Sam Shepard and Catherine Stone
Music arranged by Colleen Davis and Tom Rodwell

The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill is a surreal musical postcard from the inner landscape of the Old West. It mourns the obsolescence of heroes, showing them transfixed as relics in the mythic junkyard of American popular culture.

Another kind of love story, this Cowboy Opera conjures Pecos Bill, the cowboy comic-book icon, legendary for creating Texas, wrangling tornadoes and digging the Rio Grande, and his ‘mighty stimulatin’ catfish-riding bride, Slue-Foot Sue, who Pecos is forced to shoot from the sky on the night of their wedding. The opera takes place in a limbo where the heroes and their legend are vanishing from the memory of mankind.

Written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sam Shepard with music by Catherine Stone, this new production of Pecos Bill has evocative new musical arrangements and improvisations. It’s an off-centre fusion of a honky-tonk fever dream and wistful western ballad ending up in unexpected new places. Wagon wheels and bones for percussion instruments, Flamenco and psychedelic guitar sounds, and the moan and wheeze of a saw all combine to make an out of the ordinary Western.

‘Beautifully evoked a culture of grief and living with death, with skilled musicianship and an enveloping magic-realist set of bonfire and hay bales.’ NZ Herald

Hear local band Fez at the Granary Festival Cafe from 5pm, no charge.

Nelson Arts Festival, October 7-24 2011.

Event listed by Jacq Bell

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