- Venue
- Northumbria University Students Union
- Location
- North East England
It started well, with an interesting concept for a musical production i.e. relinquishing control to chance encounters (letters left by passing strangers in Eldon Square shopping centre, Newcastle). The first act began with a solo performance from Rajni Shah, dressed in a stiff felt dress/ costume which reminded me simultaneously of Joseph Boyce’s Felt Suit and, with the illuminated Golden hoop circling the dresses waist, some archetypal angel of death. She sang lines with familiar resonance mentioning Kielder and the pangs of teenage-esque love, rejection and longing, all the time accompanied on piano but which was, for my tastes, a little too ‘School Assembly’. Shah sang about ‘Home’ a constant concept, reworked infinitely in the imaginations of humanity… she sang about the houses/landscapes we occupy almost in terms of a constant, slowly changing backdrop to humanity which is in constant flux, decay and change…
Following this were spoken pieces by the 5 local participants (who had written those letters and left them at the Eldon Square meeting place). These were about the course of a human life over a day, a year, letters to absent (perhaps dead) friends from the past. As they spoke I wondered at why all the letters were so personal, perhaps it’s just the nature of letter writing; it’s written from an intimate, deeply personal “I” to an imagined/ absent other… whisper-like?…
( Do we use words to form a hard shell over soft wordlessness… but, even so, this may not such a bad thing?….)
But this didn’t underscore the individual humanity of everyone involved but rather, I believe, eroded it. By fitting their personal stories into this purpose built format and by gradually paring down their words into silence (through the preceding acts where their spoken parts were purged and altered then finaly, in the last act, everyone exited the stage one by one like gassed butterflys) – just seemed to demonstrate that we are all the same ‘stuff’ of humanity but in slightly different manifestations (all comes back to love, loss, ageing, illness and grief etc).
I felt too, increasingly as the performance wore on, that there was a certain sense of these artists having been being ‘parachuted in’. I felt there was something a bit grimy about the whole affair; that these middle class, paid artists were producing this performance centred around and dependent upon mainly working class, unpaid people – exploiting their deeply personal stories for musical performance with no lasting legacy. Or much artistic integrity.
The music which was developed more in acts 2 and 3 smacked of being a ‘middle way’ achieved by colliding lots of diverse (and talented) musicians into one place with the need for a unified outcome… In a way I thought it sounded too timid and mediocre, and perhaps it would have actually functioned better had they all been aloud to shake off that imposed restraint and perform as they would be inclined to (everyone recognised that stunning funk bassist who busks on Northumberland street and the guitarist’s attempts to reign in his inclination to rock-guitar solos).
Overall, this concept of life and humanity being “Glorious” wasn’t achieved at all. The musical failed to really create that feeling of apotheinia i.e. that everything is “Glorious” (from the road sweeper to the brightly coloured pink diamond on the wall of an American Diner). This failure was only cemented as, when trying inversely to illuminate that concept, the performance utilized increasingly elaborate props/ dress accessories; if everything is glorious you should be able to illustrate this in the most simple means e.g. through a mobile phone, a notch in the pavement, through the commonplace and everyday not the spectacular and manufactured.
