Tim Hopkins / Welsh National Opera – Land of Song (or Wild West) (working titles, 2013)
Current technology can appear to respect no defining boundary – no sense of place. Able to connect to anywhere, what is the value of being where we are. Excited by digitally emancipated possibilities, we are also anxious about how we are viewed by a digital realm which ‘locates’ us at every turn. Land of Song aims to intercept energy from this unresolved situation, to stand up for the value of the individual voice, sensations of connection, place and subjectivity.
In 2014, his centenary year, Dylan Thomasʼ poem Under Milk Wood will be 60. This ‘play for voices’ imagined the inner lives of people living in a Welsh village, in monologues connected by a narration made famous by Richard Burton in a radio broadcast.
Thomas’ village was virtual. As he created it he drew a map – a throwaway sketch to keep his world coherent, – streets, pubs, characters’ houses in relation to each other (Image 1.) This artefact also suggested a direction – to imagine and map inner life now.
Thomas’ voices connected with audiences who loved his art, and with many who never thought they would. He understood that all communities and audiences contain unseen intensity. Using a contemporary medium, he made listeners into neighbours, wherever they were.
Inspired by this I want to make through collaboration a new lyric ʻplay for voices’, using poetry, prose and music to make songs that tell stories – ballads, choruses, arias – brought together in a large scale operatic work defined by the inner lives of locations. The work builds on spaces new technology creates for opera, in terms of form, channels of involvement, and physical experience.
This envisages using different media throughout development.
1) An online context, hosting public participation in the work’s creation and related material
2) A site-specific performance, comprising live music theatre scenes at 10 different locations, audio-visual feeds between them, and video mapping to project the presence of one site into another. Audiences experience these scenes in two ways:
– as witnesses of events at their own location, observing other locations, and being observed
– as animators of locations, using mobile digital devices
The aim is to evoke a state of magical communication between separate places, making a momentary village of them all, asserting and contesting sensations of location and connection. As a multidisciplinary piece each element will depend on collaborations, still to be found, across words, music, online, and performance. For the moment, these constituents are imagined as follows:
Words
Thomas’ piece championed unnoticed beauty. Land of Song imagines an online platform to bring unknown writers to light, towards a new libretto. Writers submit short lyric texts, inspired by where they are, how they imagine the inner lives of those around them. These might be inspired by Thomasʼ poem, or not – the aim is to make space to take wing.
Supported by WNO, submissions may come particularly from areas they visit: Cardiff, Swansea, Liverpool, Birmingham, Southampton, Bristol, Milton Keynes, including the possibility of submissions in different languages. Writers develop in partnership with established writing artists, towards 10 lyric texts for scenes of 5 – 8 minutes each – the heart of the opera. A leading writer collaborator helps frame the creative process, and write a new narration / structure – a unifying vantage point connecting the material.
Music
10 lyrics are partnered with a different composer to create 10 short lyric theatre episodes – ballads, arias, duets –combining with narration to make a 90-minute opera. Local texts are matched with local composers, or with composers artistically concerned with location.
The form intends to support contrasting compositional approaches, apparent cultural registers and sound worlds, which illuminate each other and their audiences, eg practitioners in contemporary classical idioms, sonic arts, folk, rock. Modes of performance follow this: eg opera singers perform operatic submissions; other kinds of performer or composer/performers present other material. Echoing Burton, a Welsh performer could be a linking voice.
Performance
Each scene relates to a location (the choice dependent on writers’ submissions.) Scenes are performed in context, large/small, outdoors/indoors, domestic or public, depending on the vision of each episode and its spatial interpretation. Imagine 10 sites around the country – anywhere you can gather people and access digital infrastructure to connect locations. Each location presents one of the 10 scenes live, as a musical and visual performance, and receives the others in sequence via projected relays.
Depending on location, audiences would have one of two kinds of experience:
a) they see and are seen as part of an epic local group, occupying a distinctive vantage point at a location, where projections use architectural or other surfaces to show episodes from other places: eg, a shopping centre onto Cardiff Castle, a country house onto a garage in Milton Keynes, the Bodleian Library onto a Gasometer, a bus stop in one place onto a bus stop elsewhere.
b) an audience attends the location, listens on headphones and watches a recorded exploration/interpretation of the place on a mobile screen while simultaneously navigating the same terrain the recording displays (image4.) The live element here is the activity of the audience itself, who become animators of the work. Connection between this experience and other locations is achieved by a single camera placing remote viewers among the navigators.
The project as a whole builds on PromsMusicWalk, [devised Hopkins/BBC Proms 2012] where sensations of connection with place were accented by listening on headphones to music at locations which inspired it.
2013
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