A Shetland Odyssey

1 Jun 2005 in Music, Shetland, Visual Arts & Crafts

Navigating New Waters

BILL BANKES-JONES sets the scene for an intriguing operatic collaboration involving his opera company, Tête à Tête, and knitters and spinners on Shetland.

TÊTE À TÊTE is an opera company dedicated to innovative small-scale work of the highest possible quality. For over a year now we have been investigating how we might collaborate with native spinners and knitters in Shetland to create a major new project based on the story of Odysseus.

We have commissioned composer Julian Grant and librettist Hattie Naylor to write A Shetland Odyssey, a new full-length piece for six singers, seven instrumentalists and five Shetland spinners/knitters. The project was stimulated by an invitation from the On the Edge project at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, to visit Shetland in February 2004. This was followed by a second visit with several members of the Tete à Tête company in May and June 2004.

We have met more than 100 knitters and spinners, as well as many leading members of the Shetland arts scene. Recognising these craftspeople as fellow artists of the highest standing, we would like to develop a new piece together, incorporating knitting and spinning alongside singing and playing. We will involve Shetlanders as professional performers, and their craft as inspiration, enlisting the help of the local community to shape and develop a work of international standard.

The tale of an islander’s fantastical journey through an archipelago in a determined attempt to get home, takes on a very particular colour in Shetland. “Home” means something very, very specific and strong to any Shetlander, while travel from island to island is second nature.

A Shetland Odyssey is also a natural vehicle for the blending of opera and knitting and spinning: the construction of textiles is a key metaphor in the story, as when Penelope weaves by day and unpicks by night. Strikingly, Hattie Naylor’s previous stage adaptation incorporates six knitters representing the fates, knitting the destinies of the protagonists.

With every new commission, we regard it as an absolute necessity for the whole company to rehearse the piece at an early stage: a chance to try things out, experiment, assess, respond, rethink. With the radical step of incorporating spinners and knitters into our company, this stage is all the more crucial: their rôles in the overall scheme will be defined through experimentation at this stage, then written in as required, having explored the potential and pitfalls.

We would particularly like to throw this process open to the Shetland public, much as we did with our last commission, Family Matters, where 29 company members and 402 members of the public united to test and experiment with the first drafts of the opera over four weeks, at BAC in London.

There is a thriving community of knitters in Unst, with a unique heritage of lace-knitting: an older generation who grew up with knitting as their life-blood; a middle generation centred around the Unst Heritage Centre, increasingly knitting out of love for the craft; and a very young generation focused around the “Peerie Knitters” after-school club.

We would like to bring our company of spinners and knitters, singers, instrumentalists, authors, creative team and support staff to Unst for three weeks in October 2005 to rehearse the first draft of the opera, incorporating our Shetland performers, and responding to the input of the local community.
After the Unst workshops, we would then like to tour the company to Fair Isle for a further three days of rehearsal and feedback from the opposite end of Shetland, the birthplace of world-renowned Fair Isle knitting, and now home to an outstandingly creative, responsive and inspiring community.

Throughout this process, we shall maximise this assembly of creative resources by supporting the workshops with a number of concerts, workshops, and masterclasses with locals, as well as making space for the visiting company to learn something of Shetland spinning and knitting.

After a period of reconsideration, rewriting, planning, and consolidation, the company will return to Lerwick, reunite with our core spinners and knitters, rehearse for four weeks, again with some openness to public input, and première the final production in Lerwick in 2006.

Thus we continue our mission to create surprising, daring, intimate and uplifting opera of the highest possible quality for the widest possible audience. In this instance, we would also be aiming to create a work genuinely hand-in-hand with the people of Shetland, a product genuinely rooted in the islands for consumption both at home and abroad. We will aim to source as much of the hardware and construction of the production as possible locally, as well as a significant proportion of the creative spirit.

The production will then tour to Tête à Tête’s core audience spread through the touring venues of Scotland and England. We also plan to include a number of performances abroad, in countries where knitting and opera are equally popular, such as Iceland, Norway, the Baltic and the Far East.

My visits to Shetland so far have demonstrated that the project is warmly welcomed, particularly in the more outlying areas like Unst, Fair Isle, Fetlar, and North Mavine. Many local people made very helpful and intelligent comments about both the artistic and managerial sides of the project, and people could not have been more friendly or hospitable or constructive.

It was certainly important to return to Shetland and continue the dialogue with both old and new acquaintances, as this enthusiasm only comes with a proper understanding of the proposal, and ultimately, a personal touch.