Aisling's Children: Stepping through history

Published on Thursday 16 July 2009 16:44

SUE WILSON talks to the team behind Aisling's Children, the musical spectacular at the centre of next weekend's Gathering Highland Games in Edinburgh, and meets the young music producer creating a Scottish soundscape

MARK MURPHY, DIRECTOR AND CO-WRITER

THE original brief for Aisling's Children – Tales of the Homecoming, to be staged next Saturday at Edinburgh Castle as a centrepiece of The Gathering programme, must have seemed a monstrously tall order. Wanted: a spectacular pageant of music, theatre and dance involving around 200 performers, for an in-the-round audience of several thousand, compressing seven centuries of Scotland's national and diasporan history into an hour's duration. "Fairly daunting" is director and co-writer Mark Murphy's admirably understated recollection of that initial prospect, when he was commissioned over a year ago.

Working with a backbone narrative script penned by veteran Edinburgh journalist and playwright Raymond Ross, Murphy's task was transposing the text into the visual realm and on to the grand scale. "Raymond got the story straight and historically accurate, created the through-line, then when the baton passed to me, I started coming up with images and ideas for representing key pieces of that history," he says. "Given the size and length of the show, it was mainly a case – excuse the pun – of picking the right battles; going for the big moments and trying not to get hung up on smaller details. The story jumps back and forth in time, but it's linked together through seven key characters, all descended from the same clan. Aisling herself is a kind of mythical time-traveller, who metaphorically holds the audience's hand from the Declaration of Arbroath to the present day, so hopefully it works at a human level as well, with small intimate scenes in amongst the big epic ones."

While Murphy's hand-picked creative team combines frontline production experience of the Sydney 2000 Olympics, the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games, the opening and closing ceremonies of Liverpool's year as Capital of Culture and several Bollywood movies, he's opted largely to eschew cutting-edge mechanical wizardry, in favour of low-tech ingenuity.

"We weave a big stretch of human tartan at one point, and we create an epic sea journey with 15 ten-by-one-metre pieces of black plastic," he says. "It might not sound too impressive, but if you throw enough people at it and choreograph it properly, it becomes the mid-Atlantic. The simplest solutions are often the best ones – plus, I didn't want this show to be all hi-tech glitz and hydraulics; I felt very strongly it should seem to have grown out of the ground."

As to what he sees as the overall message or import of Aisling's Children, Murphy hopes it will stir both resident and diasporan Scots. "I've got this notion, that wherever anyone's from, they're connected to that place by the same length of elastic," he says. "Depending on how far away they are from that place, the elastic is at different degrees of tension, so when they're compelled back, it happens at different speeds. I want there to be a really immediate connection between the stage and the audience; I want people to be thinking, 'That's me: that's where I come from,' whether they live here or their family left generations ago. If there's a message there, it's about knowing your history without dwelling on the past, in order to look outward and move forward with confidence."

JIM SUTHERLAND, COMPOSER AND MUSICAL DIRECTOR

WHILE debate will inevitably arise as to whether cultural credibility or corporate compromise wins out in Aisling's Children, few could possibly argue with the choice of Jim Sutherland as its composer and musical director. A former member of seminal Scottish folk band The Easy Club, Sutherland has also recorded with artists as diverse as Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, the Chieftains, Emmylou Harris and Billy Bragg, produced more than 70 albums, and seen his compositions recorded on a hundred more. Recent career highlights include his brilliantly rootsy yet cosmopolitan soundtrack to Annie Griffin's 2005 movie Festival, and the score for 2007's Seachd, the first Scottish Gaelic feature film. The former commission led to the formation of his massive pan-Continental folk ensemble, La Banda Europa.

With Aisling's Children, Sutherland has again seized the opportunity to create a brand new line-up, this time named the True North Orchestra – new in both its hand-picked 35-piece membership and its underlying conception.

"I felt strongly from the start that for the music to have the same scale and drama as the rest of the show, it had to be played by an orchestral-sized ensemble, rather than be electronically based. It's not symphonic music, but it has that kind of power."

Sutherland also sought to take his ideas a crucial stage further than he'd seen achieved with other folk-based orchestral compositions.

"They've tended to involve putting together an existing orchestra with a bunch of fiddlers and pipers, but often they don't quite gel as a group," he says. "And that's frustrating for composers, if you want to write music across those different genres, but there isn't an ensemble that can play it so my answer was to create one. It has people from all the Scottish classical orchestras, and the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, as well as from the folk scene: I looked for classical players who really understand traditional idioms, and folkies who can work within an orchestrated ensemble.

"The instrumentation isn't actually that far away from a conventional chamber orchestra, except that I've replaced the clarinets with Border pipes. But rather than having the fiddlers sitting separately from the first and second violins, say, as has generally happened with these other big commissions, for me it was really important to create a single homogenised string section, with people from all different backgrounds side by side.

Sutherland describes the Aisling's Children score as quite contemporary in style, even though it draws on folk idioms: it's got a lot of strong grooves, which link it back to traditional dance tunes. But it is definitely new orchestral music, rather than just big settings of jigs and reels and it sounds huge. And while this inaugural material has been pre-recorded – logistical and budget constraints precluding a live performance on the night – he hopes that the True North Orchestra will live on.

"Obviously anything involving such a big group of musicians is always a nightmare to fund, but I've already had discussions with other people who would love to write for it, plus there's an existing repertoire of those previous commissions," he says. "I think it could be a really exciting thing for the development of new orchestral music in Scotland and a fantastic legacy of the whole Homecoming year."

DAN POTRA, PRODUCTION DESIGNER

FOR Dan Potra, Aisling's Children is the second time within a year he's worked on a portrait-of-a-nation show – the first having actually been called Portrait of a Nation. That was a UK-wide, youth-based arts showcase that was part of Liverpool's year as Capital of Culture.

"The historical themes and grand pageantry of Aisling's Children clearly represent a very different set of challenges, but one that Potra equally relishes.

"The history of the UK has always been a major favourite subject of mine, so it's great to get a chance to indulge myself some more," he says.

Born in Transylvania, Potra emigrated to Australia shortly after graduating from the Bucharest Art Institute in 1985, though has lately been based mainly in England.

"There's just a lot more scope in Britain to do the kind of adventurous, cross-discipline shows I like working on," he explains. "And though I'd never actually been to Scotland until last year, I'd had this real fascination with it ever since I was a child – just with all the history and folklore, and its image as this kind of gloomy dramatic place: I suppose it might have been to do with coming from somewhere a bit like that myself."

Potra's interest, though, thankfully runs deeper than Scotland's conventionally romantic trappings, as becomes clear when he describes how his contribution to the production has dovetailed with those of director Mark Murphy and producer John Wassell – the three having previously teamed up to create the opening extravaganza of Liverpool 2008.

"The history we're covering is so complex," he says. "There are so many layers to it, so many different aspects we could explore, but for obvious reasons the writers have chosen to focus in on the big dramatic moments.

"In the process, though, I've been looking at all these other strands of the story, from the sciences to architecture to whisky, for areas of reference as I've worked out the design. And though I don't have any Scottish background myself – apart from my mother-in-law – in a way being an outsider helps me understand the Old Country/New World dynamic going on in the show."

As well as large-scale outdoor events, Potra's career portfolio spans film – including Bollywood epics – theatre, opera and animation, resulting in the distinctive breadth of technique he brings to Aisling's Children.

"I've always been interested in cross-fertilising things," he says. "It helps keep opening up different possibilities, helps you surprise yourself – and if you can do that, there's a fair chance you'll surprise the audience, too." Despite the headaches it's given him, he wholly endorses Murphy's essentially low-tech approach to the production: "It does make my job harder in some ways, but this is very much a show that's driven by the characters and by emotion rather than special effects, and in that context a simple gesture, well chosen, can create the most lasting image. It's more about talking to the audience than just dazzling them."

&#149 Aisling's Children will be performed at Edinburgh Castle on 25 July at 10pm. For more details visit www.thegathering2009.com