Bow Down Diaries: Benjamin

We’ve been speaking to the cast of The Opera Group’s Bow Down about their experiences of the production ahead of their performances in the Village Underground tomorrow. In the final instalment, Benjamin Mahns-Mardy tells us how different it has been to working on other projects.

Working on this piece has been an incredible experience. Not only due to the fact that Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s music is so different from anything I have worked on before, but also that the disciplines practiced by the ensemble (varying from being instrumentalists, actors, dancers and singers) allow for a really interesting interdisciplinary performance. If one then adds to this, the fact that each venue we are performing at is almost completely different, each venue adds another dynamic to the piece. For example, being at the Municipal Market in Brighton gave the piece, in my opinion a very industrial feel. However, at the Norfolk & Norwich Festival, the venue being a clearing in a forest, with naked flames to light the performance space gave the piece a tribal, almost animalistic air. The feel of the piece will mostly likely change again at the Village Underground and at Latitude Festival. I also feel that the piece itself can alter the ‘mood’ of the venue for the audience due to its ritualistic nature.

Working with The Opera Group has also been fantastic. They have a well deserved reputation for commissioning and producing new Opera works. Now, although Bow Down is not an opera, it fits perfectly within the catalogue of works that this incredible company has performed. I very much hope to be able to work with The Opera Group in the future.

Benjamin Mahns-Mardy
Cast Member

Bow Down
Wednesday 13 June, 6.30pm & 8.30pm
Village Underground
Book your tickets now on our website. 

Bow Down Diaries: Mana

In the second instalment of our blog post about the upcoming performances of Bow Down in the Summer Festival, our Marketing & Box Office Intern, Bethan spoke to cast member Mana Shibata about her experiences working on the production so far.

The first performance was quite scary for me. As a child I trained in musical theatre and did ballet for a long time but I hadn’t performed as anything other than an oboist for the last 11 years! Freddie (Wake-Walker, director) made us rehearse without mirrors so I have no idea how I look either. The philosophy behind that comes from Japanese Noh theatre (Freddie has taken a lot of inspiration from traditional Japanese culture for this project), where how you look isn’t important but you should automatically look right if you’re “being” what you are required to be… Does that make sense?? It’s quite difficult to explain… Anyway, so I remember suddenly feeling self-conscious on the first night. Luckily I was able to pull myself out of it and carry on. Also I’m not vocally trained as someone like Simon or Tom (actors), so projecting my voice was a challenge in Brighton, where we were performing in a boomy, dark, damp abandoned meat market with sea gulls and pigeons screeching above us! It was a strange venue because the audience were sat so close to us, yet it was so dark we couldn’t see them! It felt intimate but at the same time separated from the audience because we couldn’t see their reaction.

When we moved onto Norwich, it was a completely different feel. We were in a small opening in the middle of a forest, a fairly long car journey out of Norwich (it was advertised as “secret woodland location” and the cast still have no idea where we were exactly!), lit up by naked flames and the audience perching on hay-bales! Everything had to adjust to the change of atmosphere so it felt like a completely different piece. There was a sense of openness at this venue and the audience took it more light-heartedly it seemed so I felt I could connect to them a lot more easily there.

So we are really looking forward to the Village Underground and what we manage to create there! The cast are all based in London so it’ll be our local and hopefully that will give us the confidence to explore even more with the piece. That is exactly what’s so great about Bow Down – we’ll never feel like we know it inside out because it holds so many possibilities and we’ll never run out of ideas to try.

How does it compare to orchestral playing… I’ve just got back from an orchestra rehearsal actually and I had a quintet concert on Wednesday. I’d say I’ve become a lot more relaxed in general. The whole experience has opened my eyes to the bigger world of performance art. Music obviously plays a significant role in the performance arts but it’s not everything. It’s so easy to become cocooned when music has been the only focus in your life for such a long time but now I feel completely liberated as a “performer”. Bow Down has given me the opportunity to find who I am, what I’m good at, and develop it!

The answer to your question “have I had to adapt” is that actually, no, not at all. I’ve not had to change anything that I already knew but I learnt a lot to add to it. In Bow Down rehearsals we spent a lot of time standing in a circle and without “leading” one another we tried to clap in unison. We managed to do it really well quite a few times! We’re not sure what made it work apart from being in tune with each other, which sounds very pretentious! This is something that also applies in ensemble or orchestral playing so it’s nothing new but working with non-musicians has given me the chance to re-learn it because they use a completely different language. The most important lesson I learnt was “never take rhythm and tempo for granted”. When we met Harrison Birtwistle, the first thing he explained to us was what a pulse is. Some people had only used the word “pulse” in terms of heartbeats so for them to consider that a pulse could exist in any tempo was something completely new. So why have musicians decided to think in beats and bars? I’m still working out my answer to that…

I hope Bow Down is interesting to watch but for me the aim is to tell an already well-known story in a way that showcases all our strengths. That makes it sound like a school play but hopefully it’ll be clear to the audience that it’s far more than just a play.

Mana Shibata
Bow Down Cast Member

Bow Down Diaries: Rehana

Following two very successful performances at Brighton and Norfolk & Norwich Festivals, the cast of The Opera Group’s Bow Down are currently enjoying a bit of respite before joining us at the Village Underground for their Summer Festival performance on Wednesday 13 June. We took the opportunity to ask them to share a few of their experiences so far, and first up we have flautist Rehana Browne. Enjoy! 

With recent performances at the Brighton and Norfolk & Norwich Festivals described as “intense and committed” and “phenomenal…raw, eerie and atmospheric”, The Opera Group’s production of Bow Down by Sir Harrison Birtwistle at Spitalfields Music’s Summer Festival on 13 June is not to be missed.

The Opera Group Perform Bow Down by Harrison Birtwistle at the Brighton Festival 17 May 2012

Bow Down is an improvised music theatre piece composed in 1977 by Sir Harrison Birtwistle (music) and Tony Harrison (libretto). It is a disturbing tale of sibling rivalry, based on the folk ballad of the “Two Sisters” and I feel privileged to be one of the seven cast members who have been performing this unique and powerful work during the summer. One of Birtwistle’s artistic affinities is for Paul Klee who described his drawing method as “taking a line for a walk” and I feel that this perfectly describes our four-week rehearsal process as through group improvisation, we have experimented with various melodic and physical ideas presented in the score, to see what we is created as a result.

We were highly fortunate to have the opportunity to work with Sir Harrison Birtwistle himself in the first rehearsal and his aversion to any one of the seven performers  specialising in a particular skill meant that all seven cast members were consigned to be in constant state of flux throughout the project; playing instruments, singing, dancing and acting to create the inter-dependent musical and dramatic elements which give Bow Down its sense of cubism. It is not like a play or opera where one or other of the two elements are subsidiary to the other, rather both are vital and cannot exist alone. The hybrid of actor and musician is clear in directions such as “instrumental scream” and the way in which the music often reflects the spoken text. Sir Harrison also explained that the score should not be interpreted as a direct representation of the piece, it was actually produced post-premiere and so it should instead serve as the foundation for our fresh interpretation of the piece. He told us that  “if you do something right, everything is right. If you do something wrong, everything is wrong. You can do anything as long as you can justify it.” This means that every performance is slightly different and also lays a significant amount responsibility on each individual performer, who in turn must merge into an ensemble striving for the common goal of telling the gripping tale of the “Two Sisters”.

[Birtwistle] told us that  “if you do something right, everything is right. If you do something wrong, everything is wrong. You can do anything as long as you can justify it.” 

Like a lot of Birtwistle’s work, the score presents structures which are ritualistic and cyclic, using repeated melodic and rhythmic motives and spoken refrains. However, this repetitive element (reflected in the unconventionally notated score by symbols such as mobile repeats) is juxtaposed with a system of constant development and space for improvisation (seen, for example, in the three-line staves). Birtwistle once described his music as “a sort of ostinato [which] is static and yet…is developing like a wedge” and it is this combination of the rational rituals and the irrational predictability which allows the piece to be cohesive yet also constantly developing.

Coming from background of predominately classical music training, I have found working on Bow Down hugely exciting and liberating for so many reasons. I have particularly enjoyed the opportunity to explore different means communication besides playing the flute and I have also found the link between Bow Down and Japanese Noh theatre and medieval music fascinating.

Our first performances of Bow Down were held in unusual venues which enhanced the macabre feel of the work; an abandoned market in Brighton and a fire-lit forest in Norwich and our performances in Spitalfields will be at the Village Underground, an equally apt performance space to convey the gritty and controversial tale. The Telegraph Opera described the production as “imaginatively staged…expertly performed” and it was awarded a coveted Argus Angel award for artistic excellence by the Brighton Festival. I feel that Bow Down shows Birtwistle to be a crucial perpetrator of hugely meaningful and expressive works of art in which all forms of art; music, acting and dance, work together to brilliant effect. We are all really looking forward to bringing the production to a London audience in Spitalfields on 13 June and then to the Latitude Festival on 12-15 July as part of our nationwide tour. Hope to see you there!

Rehana Browne
Bow Down Cast Member

Bow Down
Wednesday 13 June, 6.30pm & 8.30pm
Village Underground, EC2A 3PQ
Book your tickets now!

Booking now open for Summer Festival 2012!

So it’s still cold and miserable outside, and too dark in the evenings, but summer is hotting up Spitalfields Music HQ as booking is now open for our Summer Festival 2012!

Matthew Barley at Village Underground (Image: Alys Tomlinson)

Running from 8-23 June, the Festival is packed with more musical treats than ever! Leading the programme as our Associate Artists are the Gabrieli Consort & Players, cellist Matthew Barley and tabla player and music producer Talvin Singh. Between them they present an eclectic series of performances ranging from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, and Stravinsky’s mass setting to a fusion of tabla, folk and electronic, a candle-lit performance of John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil and a search for the answer to the question, What’s Music For?

Paul McCreesh in Old Spitalfields Market (Image: Alys Tomlinson)

We welcome a number of music-theatre encounters, as The Sixteen return with a new commission from Alec Roth with Samuel Beckett’s Old Earth monologues. La Nuova Musica collaborate with Vignette Productions on Sacrifices: a new staging and installation around two baroque oratorios, and The Opera Group come together with the London Sinfonietta in Harrison Birtwistle’s tale of love and jealously, Bow Down.

Talvin Singh at Oxford House (Image: James Berry)

Alongside all this, Dutch cult sensation Night of the Unexpected makes its London debut, with a cocktail of experimental beats improvised jazz, composed repertoire and conceptual pop music. Late-night concerts from Melvyn Tan with Bach suites and new variations plus EXAUDI celebrating the beauty of John Cage’s vocal music. There’s also choral music of every flavour as the Monteverdi Choir go on a European choral pilgrimage, the Choir of Royal Holloway bring songs from the Baltic States and the distinct sounds of South American baroque from Florilegium and the Arakaendar Bolivia Choir.

All this and much, much more will be filling the extraordinary spaces of Spitalfields this summer! See our website for the full festival listings, or flick through the Festival brochure online.

Booking is now open: online 24 hours-a-day at spitalfieldsmusic.org.uk (just register an account if you’re new to us) or via the Box Office phone lines on 020 7377 1362 (open Mon-Fri, 10am-6pm).