Getting to know Danae Killian.
When and why did you start making art?
Just after my third birthday I joined a Saturday morning creative dance class at Mangala Studios in Carlton. I loved to move myself expressively in response to music. Singing captivated me from a young age, too, but I would easily become overwhelmed by the intensity of the experience, which was like being filled with a liquidly blazing golden light that descended from the sky then rose wondrously in my voice like a wave, before it crashed and dissolved into a dishevelled wash of tears. It was a relief, then, to discover the piano at the age of six, with its mirrory silver tones which I could delicately touch, improvising my way among its star-like sounds. I didn't need to cry anymore. The progression from singing to piano playing was like moving from the sun to a dwelling place in the night sky. The sense of star-wandering as I play the piano has never left me.
What was your favorite Forest Collective project?
Pierrot Lunaire by Arnold Schoenberg in its various manifestations between 2016 and 2022. The project of performing this seminal modernist work in its entirety has been consistently hindered by practical difficulties (such as two years of Covid restrictions); yet these difficulties have stimulated new creative approaches to Forest's interpretation and presentation of Pierrot. I see Pierrot Lunaire as an ongoing, continually evolving project for us.
What is a fun fact about you people may not know?
I like to read the ephemerides as one reads a book or a musical score — watching the planets go by in their unfolding rhythms, listening to the harmonies their aspects create. This brings peace to my heart.
What is your favorite work of art?
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
What is one of your favorite pieces of music to play/sing/dance to?
Arnold Schoenberg's Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11 feel like my home the moment I enter them through their first three melancholically descending tones — then I stretch myself out, look around, and wait for colours, lines, forms, textures to emerge as from a Kandinsky canvas — this expressionistic emergence of patterning and gesture is different every time I play these pieces, while their deep structure remains static — timeless. It's an amazing, lifelong encounter.
You can watch Danae Killian perform in the epoch-defining Pierrot Lunaire, available now for streaming at home.
