The Sound of Transformation in a Text

I was asked by Stavroula Kounadea to bring some texts to the AudioHearth Book Club.

The idea was to bring texts where the sonic property of the text was significant and casually read and discuss the texts.

This seemed extremely straightforward at first and I immediately thought of a range of texts I could bring. But as I reflected it seemed much more problematic. I started to question what differentiated the sonic and the musical. I started to question whether any poem could not be a sonic exploration of some sort and most poems have a relation to music,

My initial interest was to find texts that were created for their potential sound as much as their potential for reading on the page.

I picked Metamorphoses because I have been working with it and it is written with a playful joy in story telling and using words that has made it a focus for recital and performance. In addition, there is the close link between poetry and song in the Ancient World (where they are often far less distinguishable than in ours) and the fact that Metamorphoses seems to have been used in tragoedia saltata the extremely popular pantomime dance form of Ancient Rome where it may well have been used as a libretto and sung.

Publius Ovidius Naso
(Ovid  Statue Piazza XX Settembre, Sulmona, Italy)

As a comparative text I initially picked Under Milk Wood which like Metamorphoses (and arguably all poetry written before the Printing Revolution) was written for the ear more than the page because it was created as a radio play.

Dylan Thomas

  

I planned to compare the two texts on the following terms

  Both written to explore sound
  Both create a unique world – even though Ovid creates a makrokosmos and Dylan Thomas a microkosmos
  Both explore a range of perspectives – in Ovid the narrator often identifies with the focal character for a story and much dialogue is included. He also sets up layers of narrative with protagonists telling stories within stories. In Dylan Thomas we have a narrator and a series of memorable characters who reappear continually
  Ovid’s stated aim is to talk of transformation of things (including people). Dylan Thomas seems to be about creating stasis. Nothing transforms in Under Milk Wood. The cycle of the day shows the villagers caught in an unchanging world.
  Both poets question the standards and mores of their time. In Ovid there is a concealed cynicism and criticism of authority. The poem ends with a statement that all empires will fall and only art (especially that of Ovid) will survive. Dylan Thomas affectionately derides the Welsh village which is named Llareggub – Buggerall – but the joke evades censorship of the British establishment. This gives both works an ambiguity and playfulness in the use of language. Meaning is deliberately confused and sound takes precedence

I then decided that this was becoming a didactic rather than reading discussion and decided to focus on Ovid – mainly passages I have used and sung in performance – and focus on the way the language evokes a sense of transformation.

I was intrigued here with whether the sonic properties of words support the unfolding narrative (not necessarily in a banal onomatopoeic film score) and decided to read in Latin and ask the listeners for opinions.

I decided to use, where possible Ted Hughes' translations and take as a comparison an extract from Finnegan’s Wake where two washerwomen transform into a tree and stone respectively.

In the end I read from the opening of Metamorphoses and the transformation of Lycaon into a wolf (also from Book 1). I read Hughes translations of these passages immediately after the Latin reading.
I read the start and end of this passage from Finnegan’s Wake ( here it is as recorded by Joyce himself).

James Joyce

In the session people seemed to be struck by the power of the Latin language – despite my poor reading- and Hughes translation although admired was felt to be less sonically effective than the original Latin texts of Ovid. In reading Lycaon the preponderance of guttural or even vulpine sounds really made the Latin text an effective sound world irrespective of whether you knew the meaning.

Joyce’s playful relation to language is a different world to Ovid who does not continually create new words through reference to a range of different languages, iconic works, registers and dialects. The reading from Joyce showed how sonically and musically sensitive his writing was and, like the Ovid text, even if incomprehensible for different reasons, rhythm and sound and especially cadential ending brought to life the text. Also, Ovid like Joyce is playful within the genre limitations he operates. He is adept at changing sand exploring different styles and more than anything this has highlighted to me the need to engage more with using the text of Ovid as a starting libretto for exploration in music and dance in Avid for Ovid.

A school workshop on metamorphoses

As part of our artist in residence programme with the the East Oxford Classics Community Centre, Avid for Ovid ran a short workshop yesterday with primary school children (year 4 at Phil & Jim's), with the assistance of a team of supportive and involved Cheney students.

We decided to use the character of Proteus, the prescient sea-god who changes shape to avoid capture by those who seek to uncover his knowledge.

Proteus by Taddeo Zuccaro ~1560
Coffered ceiling in the Stanza della Primavera at the Villa Farnese
Source: http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/vpc/VPC_search/record.php?record=48248

We felt his constant metamorphoses into various animals (a boar, a bull, a snake) as well as natural properties (water, fire, stone) gave substantial scope for exploration to a group of sixty nine year olds. As well as this the figure of Proteus bears similarities to the pantomime dancer in the constant shift of identities and attributes.

We began by exploring change within steady motion. A constant musical pulse for children to walk to was overlaid with attributes that the children modified their movement in response to – high and low, or loud and soft (big and small). We then explored different qualities in movement – jelly-like or liquid, stiff and rigid, lastly striding with authority.

In order to achieve a series of transformations in sound as well as movement we divided the children into six groups of ten – each with a specific property: gods and goddesses; trees; wild animals; water; stone; fire. They were then encouraged to find words appropriate to each property. The words would be used for a rhythmic or musical exploration of the quality of their character.

From here we explored large group conduction (techniques developed by Butch Morris to enable a conductor to facilitate the creative response of individuals and groups through prescribed hand signals) – treating each separate group of 10 children as units to be conducted in and out and explore contrasting sound worlds associated with their groups.

After these exercises in using sound and movement we recounted the story of Proteus and left each group to create a transformation in sound and movement starting with the attribute set and moving to the attribute of the next group.

Divinity -> tree
Tree -> animal
Animal -> water
Water -> stone
Stone -> fire
Fire -> divinity

The transformations each group created were impressive – rhythmic and melodic and textual sounds supported inventive representations in movement. The series of six pieces became an interesting and coherent work.

We were impressed at how quickly the children assimilated ideas and created their own response from these. Although our instructions were more focused on transformations than on stories, each group working on their particular element gave life to that element by using implicit scenarios. For example, the wild animals had a unicorn; the movers of the water group ended up encircling the sound makers, creating a vast expanse; the tree was solidly rooted, with four children making the roots of a single tree. The children demonstrated how the simple device of creating a series of transformations could be turned into a more detailed gestural and sonic narrative.

We had prepared some material that we intended to teach to help them with their response and this included the attached round based on Ovid’s text on Proteus. This proved unnecessary as they found plenty of material in the mere twenty minutes they had been allocated.

We concluded by giving some AvidforOvid demonstrations of transformations of Lycaon and Arachne. In both cases the nature of the transformation was accurately assessed by the children without fore warning although this did seem to be a group who were aware of some of the material they were presented with.

In the transformations, when the children evoked the gods and goddesses through movement as well as when they spoke of them, it seemed that the predominant characteristics were not regality and pride, but grotesqueness, mischievousness, and pushiness - a view of the capriciousness of divine power that actually reflects that of Ovid and of many in the classical world. In contrast, in their reaction to Arachne's story, it was obvious that some of the children knew the story, and that they knew it as a tale of punishable (and punished by Minerva) hubris and arrogance, when our interpretation tends more towards seeing it as a tale of creativity stifled by the powers that be.


Overall the ability of children to create narrative through sound and movement rather than prose was impressive and perhaps illustrates how we lose these methods of communication as we become more focussed on textual communication alone.
We hope to develop this work further with this age group – as yet not fully corrupted by a scriptocentric educational bias.



Malcolm (with substantial help from Susie and Ségolène)

Arachne: swinging between actions and emotions

Building up to our "Morphing in progress" showing on 28th November, I felt uncertain of my choice of episode and unsettled by the difficulties it presented. I had picked the tale of Arachne - I really like this story, it feels so simple and yet in its simplicity it manages to evoke so many issues that remain relevant today (e.g., authority, creativity, skill, recognition, and how society operates with/around/against those notions) :

Arachne, a talented weaver, finds herself refusing to pledge allegiance to Minerva, goddess  of crafts, who seems to think that as a goddess, she ought to be thanked by Arachne for having such skilled hands. A weaving competition ensues, where Minerva and Arachne each produce a tapestry. Minerva chooses to depict the gods in all their splendour, and Arachne depicts the gods in all their turpitudes evoking scenes of transformations where gods turn themselves into animals to seduce mortals. Minerva, shocked, berates Arachne, who, in despair, hangs herself. Taking "pity" on Arachne, Minerva sprinkles her with powder provided by Hecate and turns her into a spider so that Arachne can keep weaving for the rest of her life - her and her descendants after her.

I picked this story for a number of reasons amongst which are the following :

• previously I had only been characterising males (Lycaon, Daedalus, and Icarus) and I wanted to try myself out at a more familiar gender (!)
• the story involved more characters than the previous ones, and two different "levels" of storytelling: the story between Minerva and Arachne, but also the stories evoked by each of their tapestries (which I heavily edited, as Ovid evokes 24 rapes in his description of Arachne's tapestry)
• these stories were more easily defined by the actions that unfold than the previous stories I had worked on. 

This last point proved to be a sticky point. For Lycaon and Daedalus & Icarus I had first relied on their internal states and on their feelings to tell their stories, and then I devised corresponding actions (and for Icarus for instance it took some time before I was able to make him do things that felt right, that felt like him). Here, for Arachne and Minerva, the actions were so very clear that they imposed themselves to me. It seemed obvious that, for weaving, I had to use ballet for both of my main protagonists - in contrast with my Lycaon who had a butoh quality, and to my Daedalus & Icarus who had each their own physical space and texture. The pointed feet, the crisp shapes, and the stylised flowing movements of the ballet vocabulary had to be my choice for this story of weaving.
So the layering that first concerned me in rehearsals was that of adopting a specific texture or body quality for each character, and that whilst they were both undertaking the same activity, weaving, denoted by balletic vocabulary. And that somehow got me stuck in the realm of actions.
The lovely 15th century woodcut illustration below describes quite accurately the elements of action I had latched upon to spin Arachne's tale.

"Woodcut illustration of Arachne's suicide - Penn Provenance Project" by kladcat -
Woodcut illustration of Arachne's suicide.
Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

A crucial dimension that was missing was the emotional dimension (which is ironic, provided that I turned to Jung for my two previous pieces!). Why was Minerva so angry? And why was Arachne so desperate as to hang herself?

In a sense, Gustave Doré's evocation of Arachne in his illustration of Dante's Purgatorio represents what I was missing. Doré's depiction of Arachne oozes sadness and despair, without any hint as to what might have happened to her to get her there. What happened to her however is all in the woodcut illustration which in turn doesn't seem to convey much emotion.

Arachne in Dante's Purgatorio - by Gustave Doré
"Pur 12 aracne". Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Luckily, thanks to various discussions with Marie-Louise, Malcolm, and Susie, I was able to identify this important lacuna before the showing. 

I had to rectify my course and strike the right balance between the descriptive of the woodcut that almost spells out the whole narrative and the emotional of the Doré illustration.

Intriguingly, that sends us back to our character-emotion-action warm-ups... It's almost as if I had concentrated so much on the characters and their actions that I had all but forgotten about the emotions. In the end, based on the reactions from the audience, it seems that I did bring an emotional dimension to my performance and that it got through. 

I did feel Minerva's anger, her authority threatened by a nobody.  I also felt Arachne's despair, her sentiment of injustice, of being denied her own voice.

And I couldn't have done it without Malcolm's fabulous sounds. As the sequence of interventions of the characters was more complex, I instinctively concentrated more on the actions in order to not loose track of who comes next and doing what - but Malcolm's music was always there to, in turns, provide hints, support, provoke all the three (character, emotion, action) dimensions that we wanted to convey.  

In any case - that was yet another fascinating discovery and I'll have to keep working at it. 

I can't wait till we get back into the studio!  

Ségolène

Working together on new tales; rehearsal at the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building 13th November 2014

Thursday 13th saw the Avid for Ovid group come together again to share progress on the new stories that we are developing for showing on 28th November as part of the Ancient Dance in Modern Dancers Colloquium on Communicating Verbal Emotion; full information on this to be posted very shortly. Our afternoon session was in the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building at St Hilda’s; great to have access to this space with its beautiful resonant Steinway, a big thank you to Helen Slaney for organising this.

Tackling new stories is challenging our abilities to take on different characters and more complex narratives, finding ways to explore clear and seamless shifting between characters not only through altered physicality, but through selection and refinement of movement motifs and demarcation of the geography of the story in the space. Malcolm’s recent prodigious output of musical themes for specific characters brings its own challenges for him in being able to remember and instantly access a wealth of rich material while remaining alert to the potential progression of the dance. Although very much still in exploratory and improvisatory territory both music and dance are beginning to crystallize as we make decisions as to what we can discard as inessential, and get a sense of how long is required to establish character and situation.

We begin with all four of us warming up in our own ways, morphing gradually into individual explorations and practice of movement and musical material. Then a sharing of our sketches of each piece, with mutual feedback and discussion after showing. First Marie-Louise with her moving interpretation of the story of Myrrha; fascinating to see the effects of her working this in the neutral mask. Then Ségolène’s telling of the tale of Arachne raises intriguing questions about the potential depiction of a narrator and who this might be.

Minerva and Envy.

Crispin van de Passe the Elder c.1600

Source: Royal Collection Trust

Stringing together some sections of my Aglauros begins to reveal how this complicated story might be stripped back to essentials. In all cases we are reminded of the significance of seemingly minute details in projecting the narrative and its emotional heart.

Helen contributes a discreet presence and a welcome outside eye, and over tea after clarifies the arrangements for presenting the work. At the end of the session we are all surprised at how much has been achieved today, and how much more effectively we have worked. A coherent working process seems to be emerging; together with an encouraging realisation that we have progressed over the last six months.

Susie

A tune a day

As part of the preparation for our next performance at the end of November and as a way of comprehending the scope of Metamorphoses I am attempting to write themes for characters from the work in relation to the narratives that Ovid recounts.

My approach is to write one short theme every day finishing it the same day – whether perfected or not (usually the latter). The response has to be immediate and intuitive – similar to the approach within unplanned performance such as the exercises we have undertaken where a character, an emotion, and an action are specified to elicit a response from dancer and musician. However, in this case I am trying to find something essential about the character (divine or mortal) within a given story.

I hope to build a repository of motifs that can be memorised and used in performance. I have found that some themes morph into representations of other characters or emotional states – but the process is useful as a continual clarification of what can (and can’t) be signified by a theme.

Here are some examples.

Mercury dresses up:
 

Narcissus sees himself:
 

Adonis:
 

Jupiter:
 

Arachne:
 


Malcolm Atkins

On Metamorphoses: Ovid and Jung

[reposted from http://dancingconvolutions.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/on-metamorphoses-ovid-and-jung.html]

So - we've shown our work-in-progress in the striking Al-Jaber auditorium of Corpus Christi College Oxford, in front of what turned out to be a very enthusiastic audience! (Looking for pictures of the event? Check out our images section!)

The response to our performance was amazing, and so very rewarding - we still feel like it's work-in-progress though (and accordingly, we didn't plan any fancy costumes or lighting as the pictures in the gallery show). Here was our programme (click on pictures for a larger view):

The programme allowed ample time for questions and answers with audience members, and we were able to give people a glimpse into the creative process that we, Avid for Ovid, have adopted.

One of our main "warm-up" technique has been to set ourselves exercises whereby we set out to improvise around a character (either named or identified as a typical profession), an emotion (or state - as defined by the greek word pathos), and an action (one in the list of choreographic terms from the original ADMD May 2013 workshop), these are randomly associated from three lists which we had previously drawn up. Examples of such triplet associations would be: Vulcan/doubt/extending-reaching; or Minerva/joy/walking; or sailor/grief/head-tossing (these are three of the four random draws we interpreted at the showing). This technique, although sometimes very unsettling is very effective when it comes to establishing characteristic gestures or stances for a character and setting it in motion. And when the audience was blind to the random triplets (as it was the case for two out of the four draws we made), it was extremely rewarding that they could identify what the triplet was. Even more so when they seemed to naturally append a story to a triplet; as an example, when I did the sailor/grief/head-tossing triplet, it was suggested I might have been Ulysses. 

This seems to point to the fact that even if we don't set out to tell an actual story (each triplet defines a basis for a character study rather than a story) both as a performer and as an audience, we have a natural tendency to make up a story that explains the association.

And that is already fascinating in and of itself! 

It also leads us back to the question of how we can make ancient Greco-Roman myths resonate in our contemporary society. Instinctively, I believe that any kind of resonance comes through emotional connection - and this has naturally lead me down the route of Jungian archetypes. In ancient Rome, it would have been reasonable to expect that everyone knew the myths, at least to some extent, but in contemporary society we cannot realistically assume a collective knowledge of these ancient myths - so what might be a common ground that we might be able to rely upon? Have any of these stories been conveyed down to us in different/modified forms, through folk and fairy tales for example? And this is where Jung's theory of archetypes and collective unconscious becomes an invaluable source of inspiration. Here are some of the texts I consulted throughout the process (and which I am still reading). 

Ovid's Metamorphoses, in the company of a volume assembling

 Jung's writings on archetypes and of some more focused texts

 dealing with specific archetypes and how they manifest

themselves through literature and in the real world. 

If you missed our work-in-progress and this has intrigued you, Avid for Ovid will be making a short appearance (twice 15 min, at 15:45 and 16:45) at the Festival of Ancient Tales on 3rd October 2014 organised by the IRIS project, feel free to come along... 

And we're still planning a full performance of course... Stay tuned :)