Cover image: Gwalia heritage precinct, Gwalia, near Leonora. Picture: Stephen Scourfield

It weaves together the poetic, the experimental and the experiential. It evokes towns which “once thrived, bustled, lived full lives,” but which are now melancholy, abandoned places where “wind whistles through; scorching in summer and freezing the long-departed towns overnight in winter.”

This is Stephen Scourfield’s new spoken word piece Ghosts, set to music by Steve Richter. Scourfield, the long-time Travel editor of The West Australian, conjures up the spectres of the West Australian ghost towns he’s visited over decades and sets them amongst “other thoughts on ghostly presences in our lives.”

Along the way, Scourfield name-checks several of these desolate locations, including Black Flag and Big Bell, Kookynie and Cossack, Broad Arrow and Onslow, and his personal favourite, Gwalia. This is a road trip with a difference.

For Scourfield, these towns are a perfect fit for his travel writing, as they connect readers to places both new and known. However, they are also “a window into the past – largely the Goldfields history of WA,” representing a history of dreams that neatly backs into the ghostly theme – one which widens into the things that haunt us – people, emotions, memories.”

Richter’s music draws on his own memories of some of these places, as well as from Scourfield’s extraordinary photographs. As he composes, he searches for sounds and textures to underscore, so to speak, Scourfield’s writing – trying, as he says, to capture the “right feeling and vibe,” the music reflecting the parallels between “the echoes of deserted places long gone and the inner ghosts of our own pasts.”

Richter and Scourfield have worked together since their first show, for Musica Viva, back in 2015. Now, as Scourfield says, working with Richter has become “intuitive. We are on the same wavelength. He gives me inspiration and confidence.”

Carcass on the other hand sees Richter embrace an unusual instrument to inspire dancers Annmarie Clifton-James and Jo Omodei: an “old rusted piano carcass” that has been in Richter’s studio for years. Richter, a percussionist and composer with a BA in music from WAAPA, creates live sounds and electronics on this dead instrument.

Some will be reminded of poet, composer and performer Ross Bolleter’s own experiments using decaying pianos, and of the “Ruined Piano Sanctuary” near York.

Richter describes his instrument as “a rusty and dilapidated relic” which, although barely resembling a piano, being “just a block of metal and timber” still has “a sculptural and somewhat elegant appearance.” He applied himself to learning what was possible over several weeks, finding the resulting sound palette “quite eerie and intense.”

While Scourfield sees the connection between the “abandoned towns of WA” and the “rusted strings of the saved piano carcass,” this strange instrument has been a true creative catalyst for new life and movement.

Annmarie Clifton-James, the most outstanding bachelor student upon her graduation from WAAPA in 2022, explains her creative process with Jo Omodei.

“When I first got in the studio with Jo, I let Steve’s music lead the way,” she says. “Together we listened deeply to its textures, rhythms, and silences, and allowed our bodies to respond instinctively before shaping those impulses into something more structured.”

She adds that she sees it more as a dialogue than a translation. “His music speaks, and we answer with movement. We are an extension of the instrument.”

Omodei, also a WAAPA graduate who was a joint recipient of the Palisade Award, agrees that working with the piano carcass has been “both challenging and liberating.” She notes that the raw, percussive, and resonant sounds it produces invite a physical response that is different to dancing with a traditional score.

“It feels earthy, tactile, and unpredictable,” she says, the dance becoming “a partner to the sound, sometimes in dialogue, sometimes in tension, pushing the choreography into new territory.”

Clifton-James describes the process in equally vivid terms. “We work with pure strength against softness and stillness against explosive energy,” she says. “At times, the movement feels raw and almost precarious, almost as if it could fall apart at any moment.” In other moments, “there’s harmony and flow, which speak to the beauty aspect of the work.”

For both dancers, the collaborative process has been especially fruitful and fulfilling.

Omodei describes the rehearsals as having been inspiring, feeling “instinctual, an embodied response to Steve’s live score. The movement naturally echoed and complemented the music and text, and the collaboration grew into a true conversation between forms.”

Clifton-James finds the intimacy of the collaborative process, with “two contemporary dancers, a legendary musician and a travelling writer,” unique, saying the ideas that “have been thrown on the table are unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.”

She says the challenge was also the gift. “The reward was discovering those moments of synchronicity, where the movement, the music, and the piano carcass all aligned in ways we couldn’t have predicted but felt completely right.”

Carcass and Ghosts is on Thursday 23 and Friday 24 October at the Artsource Atrium, 8 Phillimore Street, Fremantle. Tickets $20 per person, and performances run from 7pm-8pm, with doors and a bar opening at 6.15pm for a chance to chat.