David was born on a Monday morning in Berwick-upon-Tweed. His mother hijacked the school bus to get from their village of Horncliffe to the hospital on the riverside. That was the last hijacking David has been involved in.
After being brought up in the borderlands of England and Scotland, then the rusting industrial South of Wales he spent his teenage years and the start of his academic and proffesional artistic career in various locations inside London.
Starting in 1999, David studied with Jeremy Harrison Actor/Musicianship BA at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama and went on directly after studies to be a founding member the international theater company NIE. His work in NIE was manifold; as performer and Music director/composer David spent the next 10 years developing his skills in devising theater and music. The musicality that David directed was not just live performance of music in the perfromances but also deeply connected to in multi-lingual, physical and visual storytelling of NIE's work.
NIE international success enabled David the possiblitly of moving to the mainland of Europe. firslt Hamburg in 2007 and later to Stuttgart where he is now almost Schwäbisch....
Other International Collborations
Compositional Work in Germany
David has been composing, playing and installing music in theater since 2001. In this time he has created music and sound for over 50 performances. He and his work have (been) performed all over the world from Sydney Opera House to the Sokolovna in the small Czech Village of Mseno.
David work spans from 'practical musciality enabler' for performers and muscians to create the musical and audial world of the show live, present and dynamic, to the role of composer for ensembles of all sizes. His work is also often a dance between rehearsals and sound production studio, composing and producing music and soundscapes in development with the creation process.
Starting in 1999, David studied with Jeremy Harrison Actor/Musicianship BA at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama and went on directly after studies to be a founding member the international theater company NIE. His work in NIE was manifold; as performer and Music director/composer David spent the next 10 years developing his skills in devising theater and music. The musicality that David directed was not just live performance of music in the perfromances but also deeply connected to in multi-lingual, physical and visual storytelling of NIE's work.
Since 2007 after moving from the United Kingdom to Germany, David started to create theater and compose in theaters and practioners prodominatly, although not exclusily, in Theater for Young Audiences. Working around the major theater around German on project for Young audiences (GRIPS, Schauburg, JungesSchauSpielhaus Hamburg) along side international collaborations as composer and performer.
With each new project comes a new challenge. How to create music and sound that enhances and supports the specific needs of the performance and the performer. Sometimes created live, sometimes with the performers, sometimes hidden sometimes and also a visual physical part of the performance dramatugie.
David finds play between aesthetic, practical and functional desires of the material and the artistic team is where the fun of the work is.
How to make the music and sound amplify that what the performance is trying to transmit.
This requires not only a wide range of compostion styles but also opens lots of possible questions on how the sound and music will be produced in relation to all the other forms of communication in the performance.
Compositional styles have ranged from hard-hitting electro dance beats to live european folk, to String Quartet for a solo violin (with loop machine and pitch shifting) to a 10 pieces Pop-Rock musical.
And also much simpler work. As the live theatrical performance is a immediate experience it can be that a simple guitar vamp or a soft melody sung is in context, live by the performers can becomes far bigger that the sum of its parts. For that reason are many
