IAN STEPHEN describes his thinking behind the events linked to the current an Lanntair exhibition, “Is a thing lost … if you know where it is?”.

IN THESE very columns I’ve expressed the opinion that the successful Events  and Cinema programme at An Lanntair can risk being a tad on the safe side.

It’s wonderful to be able to say from the heart that two recent weekends in the Stornoway Arts Centre have been occupied by  events with a fair degree of the experimental. Iain Finlay Macleod’s new play has been written about on Northings by Mark Fisher and by myself in the West Highland Free Press, but I’d like now to look back and consider the events linked to the ongoing exhibition project, “Is a thing lost…..if you know where it is?”, running at An Lanntair until 7 May 2011.

Peter Urpeth and Ian Stephen (photo Mhairi Law)

When I was invited to lead a multi-venue project by An Lanntair and Creative Scotland, I saw the opportunities provided by the combined gallery and theatre space in Stornoway as a real opportunity. The building has been designed so the art is not contained in the gallery space. So from the beginning I hoped to be able to commission works which would lead to live performance in the auditorium and screening in a real cinema environment. At times, it looked like just too much effort, to attempt to make a bridge between two separate programmes of activities.

Jazz or improvised music rarely achieves the audience the performers deserve – and that is true even in a city environment where there has been an established scene. But an Lanntair already provided the template to encourage an audience to try something out with current experience.

Past successes, for me, have happened when a cutting edge group, in contemporary dance for example, have provided workshops which have then fed into the live performance. Young musicians have also attended workshops led by innovative jazz musicians and their parents and friends have boosted the audience for a performance which could be challenging.

These links with the audience have made the work more accessible. So the event on the 26 March aimed to provide the security of a known starting point – a story in fact – and then allow performers a very open brief to give them scope to respond to that story.

The pattern was simple – commission two new short films, both linked to the Shiant Islands but taking a very different approach. Commission new music for both films with a common denominator – the improvisational pianist Peter Urpeth – but again, taking a very different tonal approach. The event would move the two new films, seen in more intimate format in the gallery, onto the big screen. And the film music would also come out into the open space as live improvisation.

The whole project is an exploration of the different forms a story can take – an examination of the risks and gains of moving it from one form to another. So a voyage from one Island to another can be documented by one participant as a minute dissection of the hours spent sick and incapable from moving from one protected bunk – or the story can be compressed into tiny vignettes of an external viewpoint by another.

The starting story for the Saturday event was outlined in collaboration with the very natural but compelling storyteller Maggie Smith. We took the story behind the song ‘Ailein Duinn’, but taking the viewpoint of that song – the female view of a sea-tragedy along similar lines to those navigated by the late Lewis writer Norman Malcolm Macdonald in his verse-drama Anna Caimbeul.

Norman referred to his work as an attempt to create a Japanese Noh play in Gaelic. So I’d argue that it’s nothing new to take a more experimental or cross-cultural approach to a story embedded in our own local geography.

Peter then laid down some melody lines from the song, on piano, but leaving space in plenty between the variations. This was the basis for his part in the soundtrack of A Boat Retold, made for this project by Sean Martin and Louise Milne.

The documentary has a narrative, but expressed in the way a poem tells a story – not always following a sequence of beginning, middle and end, but looking for the more elusive connections that take you below surfaces of meaning. Improvisation on flute, by Norman Chalmers, recorded live at the Shiants, was another key element.

The boat Broad Bay was built in Orkney in 1912 but rebuilt from the keel up in Lewis, very early in our current millennium. Is it the same boat? The question was explored by following a voyage to the Shiant Islands in the new boat, as an echo of an earlier adventure, examined in the Radio Scotland series Voyagers, in 1998.

The documentary follows a line you might trace to the works of Peter Watkins (Culloden and The War Games) rather than a more conventional approach. The same directors have been showing their last documentary along an international trail of film festivals. It is a study of the great Scottish film director Bill Douglas. The approach hinges on Douglas’s fascination with early cinema equipment, like magic lanterns.

As a kind of homage (like the storytellers nod to Anna Caimbeul), A Boat Retold alternates between HD clarity and occasional use of Super 8 film to balance story and mood.

Andy Mackinnon took a sustained expressionistic approach to his own new film. Sruth nam Fear Gorm (Blue Men of the Stream) is an intense study of the Shiants legend. His opening shot is an absolute gift – the chain of Islands as a mirage floating above the surface of the sea.

It was taken during a winter voyage when the temperature change caused the familiar icon to take a new form. The first section has Urpeth’s music as interplay with vocal improvisation by the internationally renowned Maggie Nicols.

This gives way to the recorded sea-sound – its own music behind the dance of wind against tide conditions which betray the suggestions of the lost souls of generations of mariners.

Peter Urpeth and Maggie Nicols (photo Mhairi Law)

The screen was removed at this point and the evening given over to Urpeth and Nicols. It was a rare opportunity to bring together two artists who have worked together in the past. They went for it – and this time the piano was not spare but busy and rapid, with the energy required to balance the inventive tirade of syllables and snatches of melody which were let loose by Nicols.

It was intense, and I found myself moving in and out of the improv. When it took a hold you became completely lost in its insistence. Most of the audience stayed with it. I spoke to one – a woman who loves the sea but also rightly has awe of it.  She said the improv evoked wind in rigging and weather between islands.

I’d say that reaction made the evening worthwhile. I’m grateful to the whole of the an Lanntair organisation as well as to the artists and the funders who trusted a growing team far enough to come this far. The project continues.

© Ian Stephen, 2011

Links

• Is A Thing Lost …
• Ian Stephen
• Maggie Nicols
• Peter Urpeth