FESTIVAL: A JOHNSMAS FOY – IN SEARCH OF HOME (Stromness Academy Theatre, Orkney, 22 June 2010)
Nalini Paul.
FESTIVAL: A JOHNSMAS FOY – IN SEARCH OF HOME (Stromness Academy Theatre, Orkney, 22 June 2010)
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23 June 2010
MORAG MACINNES considers the role of the Foy in the St Magnus Festival THIS IS the 33rd St Magnus Festival. Not bad going for a venture dreamed up around a Stromness kitchen table with a mixture of optimism, graft and sheer chutzpah. It’s lasted longer than the couple of wet summers the cynics suggested would drown it. It’s also Glenys Hughes’ last stint as director – she took over in 1986.
In the 70s, Benjamin Britten warned Peter Maxwell Davies, when apprised of his hopes for an international classical music event on a small group of islands, “it will be very tough, and you will be resented a lot.” But time’s a great leveller, and few voices are raised against this concentrated explosion of culture nowadays.
Local choirs, schools and community drama groups are mobilised. Local beds are filled, and local eateries busy. Shows are sold out. The festival has spawned its own slightly dishevelled and much loved child, MagFest, who plays with jugglers in Spiegeltents and watches men playing music on tables in disused sheds.
A Johnsmas Foy has always been, in the schedule, a celebration of our domestic, Orcadian cultural history. It has sat demurely amidst recitals by Ashkenazy, readings by Heaney. Noye’s Fludde and Nicola Benedetti have graced a programme each, but A Johnsmas Foy is always there, appearing first, thanks to the insistence of Marjorie Linklater in 1978 that something essentially local should be part of the programme. She directed readings of our stalwarts: Muir, Rendall, Brown, and of course, her rambunctious husband Eric.
Johnsmas is midsummer, and the sun’s power – and fertility, now that the calves and lambs were safely out and the fields yielding too – were celebrated by bonfires, in the 19th century and before. Houses were circled with fire. Burning torches were thrown in the byres of barren cows, to make them thrive. People danced all night. Girls carried home half burnt peats, doused them in a basin of piss (the strang bing), stuck them on the lintel till the morning and then broke them in half. The colour inside would be the colour of their husband’s hair….
The Festival Foy’s traditions are a little more douce. Sometimes a recital by voices, sometimes a drama voiced by local folk, ‘local artists’, schools, once a film – it has in its way mirrored the uneasy compromise between the domestic and the international talent showcased in Orkney over the years – and the age old tension between the amateur and the professional artist.
This year’s offering, In Search of Home, conceived by the current GMB Fellow Nalini Paul, and directed by Aimee Leonard, reflects this perfectly. It’s a sweetly produced, captivatingly simple story of the journey through life. Two characters, one from the East, one from the West, turn the weathervane, under the stars, and travel. The Orkney Traditional Dance Association direct their wanderings through traditional walzes and reels; Paul reads her own poetic narration; members of the Orkney Song project and local musicians sing and play.
The migration theme is enlivened by artist/poet Sylvia Hays’ Papageno-like interventions. Dressed as a scarecrow-cum-twitcher, moving like a godwit, she turns ‘bird facts’ written by our local RSPB manager Eric Meek into witty comedic meditations on travel. What can it be like, landing on an Orkney shore, when you come from Ellesmere Island? A welcome rest? Or do the locals see you off?
Paul’s own preoccupations – she is Indian, brought up in Vancouver, domiciled in Glasgow, working in Stromness – are evident. Like the couple searching for a home and an identity in her tale, and the birds she loves, who have figured large in the work she has done as Fellow, she’s a wanderer looking for roots.
In this she’s like many of the new generation of artists and writers who have settled in the ‘mixter maxter’ that’s Orkney. The symbolism of her narrative is apt. We’re all locals now, and look forwards, not back. We all search for a welcome, look for a tradition which will embrace us. We all want a nest somewhere.
The full house gave a warm reception to this production. There were those who said ‘the dancers needed a clap an a heugh. It wisna like a Harray dance. An whar were the Orkney voices?’
But art moves audiences on. The Orkney voices were there – from Lynn Campbell’s dialect lilt, Aimee Leonard’s pure tones, and the modern student Scots of the young lovers, to Sylvia Hays’ Virginian drawl and Paul’s own elusive Canadian twang. Lines from G M Brown mingled seamlessly with Paul’s own. Orkney tunes and new music teamed up to illustrate Sonja and Aaron’s travels.
It was an elegant little performance, poignant and life affirming, unobtrusively celebrating some very big shifts in Orkney’s cultural climate. Where will the Foy journey next year, under a new Festival Director (composer Alasdair Nicolson)? It’ll be interesting to see.
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