Figures in a Floating Landscape is a dance, music, sonic soundscape performance from composer Peter Coyte and choreographer Dora Frankel featuring two musicians and four dancers. The piece is Coyte and Frankel’s third collaboration and the second part of their Turner Trilogy, the first piece being The Unfolding Sky: Turner in the North.

Figures in a Floating Landscape delves deep into the later improvisatory sketches of JMW Turner when he resided in Kent, and re-contextualises this work in relation to today’s climate change, the damage to the coastline and the evolution of the towns Turner knew so well.

In preparing the score Peter Coyte, along with musician colleague Martin Elliott, retraced Turner’s steps making field recordings. Coyte then spent time experimenting and developing the score using these materials. In February 2018 musicians, dancers, visual artists and photographers were invited to Whitstable’s Horsebridge Arts Centre to continue development of the piece. In these sessions the basic form took shape and, with funding from Arts Council England, the artists have now developed it as a full length piece, an exciting new abstract work that packs an emotional punch.