list.co.uk/festival Return to the Voice | FESTIVAL THEATRE
VOICE ARTISTS
The latest Edinburgh Fringe show by acclaimed Polish theatre company Song of the Goat is inspired by Scotland’s musical traditions, writes Mark Brown
T he great Indian cultural theorist Homi Bhabha writes of ‘hybridity’, a cultural phenomenon in which artists bring together aesthetic inl uences from different times and different places to create new art forms. It is an idea that could almost have been created to describe Polish theatre company Song of the Goat.
The company hails from the western Polish city of Wrocław, where the famous theatremaker, and the Goats’ great inspiration, Jerzy Grotowski had his artistic laboratory. Like Grotowski, the Goats’ work is the product of intensive research and preparation. When Rupert Thomson, artistic director of Edinburgh’s Summerhall venue, and Robert McDowell, the venue’s founder, proposed to Grzegorz Bral, director of Song of the Goat, that he consider making a work based upon Scotland’s ancient musical traditions, the Polish artist was initially reluctant. Although he had heard a lot of Scottish traditional music, Bral didn’t consider himself knowledgable enough to pursue the project.
Chronicles – A Lamentation, the piece with which the company made its Edinburgh Fringe debut in 2004, is typical of Bral’s method. The Goats steeped themselves in the southern European music of lamentation. The result was a deeply emotionally resonating, beautifully sensuous production driven by the company’s extraordinary, original polyphonic song. After some rel ection, Bral decided to reconsider the Scottish project. ‘I have such a love and respect for Scotland, I decided that we should allow ourselves to be inspired by the Scottish tradition.’ For Bral, being inspired meant four expeditions: two to the Isle of Skye, one to Harris
and Lewis, and a fourth to the archives of the Edinburgh Music Library. These trips included working with the musicologist John Purser, who became, in Bral’s words, the Goats’ ‘ethnomusicology guru’. Bral eventually selected 15 songs which the Goats would ‘take as an inspiration, a starting point for our own compositions and improvisations’ in creating their latest work, Return to the Voice. This new piece will be performed in the appropriately sacred venue of St Giles’ Cathedral. The work, which Bral says will be more like a concert than a theatre performance, is a hybrid of Scottish, mainly Gaelic, traditional musical forms (and, in one instance, Burns’s poem A Bard’s Epitaph) with Song of the Goat’s very particular style of theatre and polyphonic song.
What it is not, Bral emphasises, is an attempt to recreate Scotland’s ancient music. ‘Please express my apologies,’ he urges, ‘to anybody who may feel offended, because the music is not exactly like it should be. This is not my role. I am just a theatre director inspired by the profound experience of the Gaelic music.’
As theatregoers who have experienced Song of the Goat’s work at Edinburgh festivals past will coni rm, Bral’s apology is almost certain to be unnecessary. A very beautiful and deeply moving work of musical theatre seems to be in prospect.
Return to the Voice, Summerhall @ St Giles’ Cathedral, 0845 874 3001, 7–25 August (not 10–12, 17, 22–24), times vary, £15 (£13). Preview 6 Aug, 10.30pm, £12.
‘I decided that we should allow ourselves to be inspired by the Scottish tradition’
31 Jul–7 Aug 2014 THE LIST FESTIVAL 73