black feather rising
Deep in your heart there sleeps a song that you have never sung
LATEST NEWS
23-10-08 read the essay librettist David Rudkin wrote about the creation of the libretto for Black Feather Rising.
10-10-08 For an impression of the preparations for Black Feather Rising go to www.paramvir.net to see some video footage of baritone Alistair Shelton-Smith and composer Param Vir.
synopsis
Black Feather Rising is a love story which is inspired by a native American myth. It inhabits an ancient elemental landscape, where men and women experience themselves as creatures of the natural world, and live in interaction with it. At a wedding, a young married woman and a young man from outside her tribe see each other and fall instantly and irrationally in love. Each feels more and more powerfully drawn toward the other. But to reach each other, she has to leave everything and everyone she knows, and journey toward him across a difficult and hostile earth; he has to confront negative demons that rise up within him to inhibit him. In taking these risks, they each release in themselves a wonderful life-giving power. Two ‘ordinary’ people thus become remarkable. The story is a challenge to our contemporary ‘rationalist’ culture and its threatened destruction of the natural world.
tour schedule black feather rising
performances in 2008 (NL)
introduction
When in 2005 Dutch harpist Godelieve Schrama was introduced to the music of Param Vir she immediately fell for its magical and fairytale-like quality. She invited him to write a small scale music theatre piece using soprano, harp and percussion instruments as a basis. Vir accepted the invitation and proposed to add a baritone, one or two wind instruments and string instruments. Also, he proposed to work with the Irish playwright David Rudkin to provide the libretto. The two worked together in the past on Param Vir’s opera Broken Strings which gathered international acclaim.
In search of an interesting subject that would suit a small scale music theatre setting Vir and Rudkin came across a collection of native American myths, one of which struck their imagination.
theme
Black Feather Rising is a story about a love thought impossible and about inner strength. It is in fact an ancient, timeless story, a theme on which Shakespeare based his Romeo and Juliet. It is about two people fighting the dark powers outside and inside themselves in order to be together. And like most famous love stories this one too is about courage and self-sacrifice. Both the man and the woman take huge risks, by leaving behind their certainty and throwing themselves into the unknown. Staying or returning no longer is an option. Two people ‘blindly’ set out on a journey, not knowing where it will lead them to. They overcome their fear for freedom, the fear for the consequences of their choice.
Every one of us is determined by the bounds of surroundings and destiny. Family relations, tradition, place of birth define our lives to the extreme. This is the case in this ancient story but equally applies to the here and now, anno our western civilised world. Black Feather Rising puts the question to us whether man is really free to choose. Can someone just follow his heart and put aside all that is safe and self-evident?
composition and libretto
Param Vir studied with Peter Maxwell Davies and Jonathan Harvey among others. He likes to draw from Indian ‘material’ but doesn’t consider himself to be a ‘multi-cultural’ composer. His music is original and personal in the first place. He expressed himself about this by saying that ‘(…) it is not a stylistically conservative, romantic-style score with some blending-in of quasi-Indian music. Such self-conscious attempts to create a stylistic melange and accommodate some notion of ‘Indianness’ by administrative fiat are rather doomed to go nowhere. It takes courage and faith to create something truly worthy.’
Vir recently expressed himself about the music for Black Feather Rising in a more concrete manner. He pictured ‘ a highly sculpted sound world, effected and visualised through the use of graphical templates, section by section, as in much of my previous work. The musical design will achieve clear aural imagery, strong vibrant colours using the gamut of instruments and doublings, extremely virtuosic harp writing and a rich range of percussive sounds that creates a bridge between the other instruments.
A small instrumental ensemble but a large sound palette will give expression to the landscape and inner life of the two characters. In this piece the music is able to express the kind of feeling that otherwise would not be able to find its way out, at least not the kind of living or surviving the two lovers in this story experience.’
Over the past years Vir successfully worked together with playwright David Rudkin on a number of operas and music theatre productions, among which Broken Strings. For Black Feather Rising Rudkin wrote a libretto that can be characterised as simple but with a poetic power. Rudkin explains himself by saying that ‘the continuous action is an ascending curve of raw human emotion, from yearning, up through pain, terror, desolation, anger, to a climax of wonder and joy. In a contemporary culture of noise, activity and ‘information’, it re-asserts the primacy of each individual human quest, the search within, and – paradoxical in a musical work – the power of silence to illuminate the soul.’
Black Feather Rising is different from current opera and music theatre repertoire since the singers and the musicians share an equally important part of the action on the stage. By performing on the stage, the musicians enhance the dramatic action in a way that is immediately perceivable by the audience. While this way of performing, without a conductor, makes high demands on the musicians it creates an interaction and dynamism that would not be experienced while playing in the orchestral pit.
direction
Jos van Kan regularly directs stories dealing with the barriers represented by surroundings, origin, family and tradition: ‘Every man tries to create his personal freedom. I think it’s an exciting theme. It has both a personal and a social side. The way you relate to your surroundings, to the people whose lives you share; literally: the grounds, the soil, the region, the landscape where your roots lay. I often look for stories in which Nature plays a central part, in which humans are not necessarily the standard measure of the world. We have been thrust upon this slowly turning globe and we have to define our place and space on it. We all land in a family, a tradition, on a certain place. Many people try to cut loose from it but it is a battle you do not always win.’
Sometimes Van Kan finds this theme in existing repertoire, sometimes he creates new material in cooperation with others like in a Taiwanese/Dutch co-production which started touring recently. In Black Feather Rising different cultures are mixed (native North America, , , the ), without imposing multiculturalism or folklore on his audience. For that the themes uses are to universal.
As already said Nature plays an important role in Black Feather Rising, as a bringer of disasters and blessings. De protagonists experience Nature in a way that rationally thinking Western Europeans (no longer) can imagine. Black Feather Rising relates of the inner journey of the two main characters. It is music theatre in which not only the woods, the rocks, the winds and the birds can be heard, but also the longing and the despair of two lovers who are subject to the powers of nature they cannot control. The picturing of Nature, sometimes sweet, sometimes threatening, and of the powers that are hidden in it, put to question our contemporary rationalist culture.
stage design, costumes
Jos van Kan has a long standing cooperation with Michiel Voet, who designs his sceneries, and with costume designer Dorien de Jonge. Voet creates abstract, modest sceneries. The images he generates come to live by using suggestion. The spaces he designs are compelling and dominating the atmosphere, while leaving enough space for the narration to enfold itself.
Costume designer Dorien de Jonge is always looking for the tension between the known and the unknown. She designs costumes that are realistic and sometimes even cliché but at the same time carry abstract and unexpected elements. The audience experiences much pleasure while looking at them because they do not always meet their expectations.
