Full Biography
Born in Pennsylvania, George Higgs has worked for the last 18 years in Ireland as a composer. Kahoogaphone, his first guerrilla opera, tells the story of a homeless man who invents a machine designed not to work and built entirely out of junk. He produced and directed the play (and built the world's first Kahoogaphone) in Dublin's New Theatre in 1999, and followed this success with several street performances sponsored by Temple Bar Properties. Soon after he wrote his second guerrilla opera, The Suicide of Miss Understood, the story of a woman who, in a pill-induced reverie, dreams she is on a live TV show where the studio audience votes to spare or take her life. He produced this in Dublin's Temple Bar Music Centre with a cast of seventeen in July 2000.
Image of first Kahoogaphone (P. Hannan) 2001 saw a second production of Kahoogaphone, this time dubbed Dr. Scrontium's Mad Kahoogaphone and Homeless Medicine Show. The production toured Ireland in a rickety old van with a cast of 8 and a large Kahoogaphone (the world's second, sadly inferior to the first), ending up in the Salvation Army Church for a week's run as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival. The production and tour joined forces with the homeless action group, Focus Ireland, in an effort to raise awareness of the lack of affordable housing in Ireland and encourage the government to introduce rent control. The cast and crew held a Kahoogaphone workshop for children and led a march along the Liffey boardwalk complete with Kahoogaphone, drummers and stilt-walkers.
From 2002 to 2004, George worked on his new wordless opera, HONGONGALONGALO, and undertook a master's degree in music technology at Trinity College. There he was able to workshop the opera in progress as part of his thesis and hold three performances of different sections of the piece. The opera tells no clear story, demands a cast of 32 musicians, lasts one and a half hours and involves the musicians moving about the entire space performing a variety of bizarre actions. Premiering in the Belvedere College chapel as part of the Dublin Fringe 2004, HONGONGALONGALO, received accolades all round including a four star review in the Irish Times.
Singers moving about the theatre in HONGONGALONGALO
In 2006, George recently was awarded the Director’s Prize from Misha Rachlevsky of the Chamber Orchestra Kremlin for his composition, The Famine Dance, performed in both the Kremlin and Carnegie Hall. Maestro Rachlevsky has since commissioned another piece from George, entitled WVH, for performance in 2007.
Since 2005, George has been involved in the Tower Songs Project, run by the Dublin ,City Arts Centre,. This project seeks to artistically document the changes around Dublin, specifically in 5 sets of corporation flat tower complexes scheduled for demolition. His role in the project as a composer is to record audio samples on site in order to create compositions and performances inspired by them. In the 2006 performance, only days before the demolition of the last blocks of the old Fatima Mansions, he contributed the Fatimaphone: a hammer dulcimer he fashioned to model the flat complexes with built-in electronics, connected to 4 speakers made out of steel rubbish bins to be hoisted on pulleys to the top balconies of the flats as the audience moved about the courtyard.
George performs on the Fatimaphone under the scrutiny of Fatima residents
In 2005, George co-founded an experimental opera project, Glue Factory, which devises musical and visual performances inspired by the spaces they fill: derelict buildings, old factories, farms, houses and city streets. Audiences are asked to pass through these spaces following a simple set of instructions. Glue Factory has carried out work for a wide range of commissioning bodies, most recently the Butler Gallery for a performance in a derelict workhouse in Callan, Killkenny.
George performing with Glue Factory
For Glue Factory, George composed the Workhouse Sonata, for string trio and three voices, and the Brass Picnic, a large scale work for sixteen outdoor brass musicians which was nominated for the Spirit of the Fringe Award 2006. Currently, they are developing an installation for the Dublin Docklands in a disused diving bell on the south quay.
George was awarded an Arts Council Bursary in 2005 to research his compositional technique of asynchronous harmony. This research has permeated all of his work since.
The Kremlin Chamber Ensemble performs The Famine Dance in Carnegie Hall. Nov, 2007
Over the years George has written some three hundred songs, several straight plays (In Case, Dog is Dead), performed as a musician for numerous bands in Dublin and San Francisco(Triple Piglet, The Moriarties), scored and orchestrated a film(Park , directed by John Carney and Tom Hall), written thousands of simple poems and acted in a number of television commercials (although he doesn't own a TV). He plays banjo, guitar, the singing hoses and works periodically as a choir director.
Teacup speakers built for Storm in a Teacup performance
George is currently at work on the Electro Acoustic Exchange, for which he was awarded and Arts Council Project Award 2007. In this project, George will be collaborating with a London Foreign Exchange Trader and cellist Kate Ellis to make music out of money. The Electro Acoustic Exchange is due for performance in the Project Cube in October 2007.