An Island Tale

MALCOLM MACLEAN is the director of Pròiseact nan Ealan, the Gaelic Arts Agency, and co-executive producer/creative director of this month’s hugely ambitious multi-media extravaganza St Kilda – A European Opera

ST KILDA – A European Opera will take place in five locations around Europe on 22 and 23 June, plus the island of St Kilda itself. The opera will use a script and libretto written by novelist and playwright Iain Finlay Macleod, with music composed by Jean-Paul Dessy and David Graham, traditional Gaelic singers in each venue, dramaturgy by Thierry Poquet, film contributions from Gilles Combet and Nadege de Peganow, and creative direction by Lew Bogdan and Malcolm Maclean.

Performances will take place in Studio Alba in Stornoway, Valenciennes in France, Mons in Belgium, Düsseldorf in Germany, and Hallstatt in Austria. Malcolm explains the story so far.
 
NORTHINGS: Malcolm, can you tell us briefly how this project came about?

MALCOLM MACLEAN: For those not familiar with us, Proiseact nan Ealan is the lead body for Gaelic Arts development, and has been for the last 20 years, but we also have a production company. St Kilda is the most recent of our productions, and in that context I am the co-executive producer and co-creative director with Lew Bogdan. The original concept was Lev’s. Three or four years ago he approached us regarding the idea of doing an opera based on the story of St Kilda. He had become fascinated by it, not to say obsessed, and was really keen to do this project.

All of a sudden we realised that this wasn’t just an exciting idea, but it was now a lot of money by any measure

N: Was it always a Europe-wide project?

MM: His idea was always to have it performed in several different countries. He came over for a look at St Kilda and the practicalities of how it might be achieved, and also to find people that he could work with. I remember thinking initially that this was a crazy idea, but that it was the kind of lunacy that should be encouraged, so we invited him over.

We spent a couple of days out there, and in our subsequent discussions I was able to point out that there were a number of things he needed to deal with if they wanted this to happen, some of them logistic, some of them to do with the time frame, and also the Gaelic context of the project.

We worked through these things, and got them engaged with the significance of the Gaelic context, and also the fact that St Kilda is not unique within the Hebrides in terms of evacuations. In many ways it is symptomatic of a wider dynamic.

N: But it has a peculiarly iconic status in that context, doesn’t it?

MM: Absolutely, and it is very special. It is the UK’s only dual world heritage site, but for all its fame there is no real St Kilda interpretative centre – for something that would be one of Scotland’s, and indeed Europe’s most significant icons, there is little formal celebration of it.

So they went back to Europe after these discussions, and I began to feel well, it might happen after all. They then came back and asked if we would be a partner in the project, which we thought about and agreed to, and then they came back again and asked if we would be the lead body in the consortia.
 
If you have any experience of European project, you know that the lead body takes all the weight, and has the ultimate legal responsibility, so that was a big issue to take to me board. We discussed it, and decided to take it on, so we drew up a funding application to send to Brussels, and received 885,000 euros, which is almost the largest award they can give.

Their ceiling is 900,000 euros, and the only reason we didn’t get that, we later discovered, is that 30,000 of the local funding didn’t qualify for 50-50 matching funds. It was a unanimous decision otherwise, and is probably the biggest such award to come to Scotland, if not the UK.

Altogether we have generated about 2.3 million euros across Europe, and one of the things we are particularly pleased about is that we have been able to get a very large amount of European money invested in celebrating Scottish culture.

All of a sudden we realised that this wasn’t just an exciting idea, but it was now a lot of money by any measure. It was clear that it wasn’t just us that saw it as exciting, and the key thing for Brussels was the idea that it was a project that united the very outer margin of Europe with the heart of central Europe, and that linked up ancient sites of Celtic Europe at St Kilda and Hallstatt, and also the oldest of the surviving Celtic languages, in the context of a very contemporary arts project involving five countries and a very ancient story.

N: Must have been, umm, an interesting process getting it all together?

MM: Yes, with interesting in capitals! It has been a genuinely fascinating process, though, and a really educational one for us all. We have been fortunate with our colleagues in Europe, in that we have been dealing with a great team of highly creative people that have taken on the collaborative process that has made this possible.

We have had to engage with the European theatre tradition and with different ways of doing things in different places, and that has been very educational as well. It has demanded a lot of dialogue and communication and organisation, but we have progressively navigated to this stage over the last two years.

N: What is going to happen with the performances on the two nights?

MM: They will take place in five locations around Europe, plus St Kilda itself. The Stornoway show will be in the film studio, and will be a promenade production, and there are various associated workshops and talks in An Lanntair that week, and perhaps elsewhere in Scotland as well.

It will happen simultaneously in all the venues, and each production will work to the same script, score and libretto, and each will have a Gaelic singer and its own small orchestra and choir. In essence what people will hear in each location will be very much the same in all five venues, and each will also have very rich package of pre-filmed material, including the French cliff dancers company, but also time-lapse material, aerial shots and even underwater footage from the island.

There will also be elements of the show that will come live by satellite from St Kilda to each of the five locations. That will be the one shared visual element, because otherwise each venue will have its own specific production with its own unique visual interpretation of the common libretto and music, and these will be startlingly different in each location.

N: Are you confident about the technology on the night?

MM: Totally. We are as confident as you ever can be that it will work as we envisage. The BBC are dealing with that, and will also be putting out a live webcast on the Friday night, so it will be seen worldwide, and that reflects the worldwide interest that we have had in the project.

Even in the two years we have been setting this up, there have been advances in the technology available to them. To be honest, we are less concerned about the technology than we are about the one variable we can’t control, which is the weather.

N: Which has always been one of St Kilda’s big problems, hasn’t it?

MM: Ironically, it is the eternal elements again – it’s the same sea and weather that isolated St Kilda in the first place. Each member of the team has been stuck out there at some point during the preparation period, and that is possibly the biggest challenge we have to face.
 
N: How has Iain Macleod dealt with the issue of narrative?

MM: It is structured in three acts, telling the story of St Kilda. The first is the community balanced but on the edge, the second is the fall, and the third act is exodus. Iain has used two parallel narratives, which you might see as the love story and the death narrative. They intertwine, and he has tried to try to use the specific human stories to tell the story of the wider community.

N: Using a combination of acting and song?

MM: Yes. The musical concept behind it is essentially call and response, as with Gaelic psalmody, and the songs we are using all have some relevance to St Kilda, with a contemporary musical setting. Kathleen MacInnes and Cathie Ann McPhee will be the Gaelic singers in Stornoway, and we are still finalising the details of the other venues, although Alyth McCormack will be in Belgium.

Gerry Mulgrew [Communicado Theatre] is our theatre director for the Scottish production, and Andy Thorburn [Blazin’ Fiddles] is the musical director. They have been working on it using Scottish Opera’s rehearsal facilities in Glasgow, and it is great to see it all coming together now.

We have been so obsessed with the practicalities and fund-raising and organisation that it is wonderful to see people actually rehearsing the show – it reminds us what this has all been for, and it is going to be a unique event.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2007

Links

• Pròiseact nan Ealan
• St Kilda – A European Opera