Jamie xx composes in code

By Hazel Sheffield

Jamie Smith, better known as Jamie xx, will remember 2015 as the year he released his first solo album, “In Colour”. It was also the year he wrote music for an exhibition at the National Gallery in London, started writing a third album with his band, the xx, and premiered his first ballet, “Tree of Codes”.

“Tree of Codes” wasn’t his idea. The concept came from the choreographer Wayne McGregor, who wanted to create a ballet based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Tree of Codes” – a story cut from the pages of a 1934 book by Bruno Schulz, “The Street of Crocodiles”. Foer took the original book and sliced words out leaving rectangular gaps in the pages to create both a new narrative and what the publisher described as a “sculptural object”. McGregor worked with Olafur Eliasson, a Danish installation artist, to create a set made from screens, mirrors and light that similarly cut up the stage.