The Autumn Music Festival 2003 Aelfgyva
Director: Jane Woollard
Designer: Amanda Johnson
Composer,Voice and Hurdygurdy: Stevie Wishart
Circling the design process: First thoughts
When I began working on set and costume designs for a music theatre project about the Bayeux Tapestry, my first drawings toyed with notions of recreating, even partially, images of this wonderful document. I drew for many days, focusing on the small disarming details in the tapestry ‘margins’—a helmet dropped in battle below the threaded ‘groundline’ of the main battle scene; a bird upon a stylised twig watching a decapitation unfold; a hairy comet forging a path across the sky, oblivious to the blood being spilt in earthly battle below. The star for example, is raggedly present to us in the original cloth; the story of the battle, as well as the story of commemorative ‘work’ is not only told by artful embroidering, but by the stains and tears and frays of the cloth. This has a particular fascination for the contemporary viewer. I became interested in the aspects of the cloth’s work and making, as much as by the representation of the actual events. The first batch of thumbnail sketches offered a way of familiarising myself with both the story and the iconographies of the story. The focus on detail was also a way of letting the historical idiosyncrasies of the tapestry and its ‘characters’ come to the fore. As this play imagines and re-presents the life of one of the few women in the tapestry, this process took on a literal and metaphorical importance.
My early discussions with the play director made me think very broadly, and perhaps more intellectually, about the ways in which contemporary visual and theatrical culture renovate ideas of medievalism. How might a contemporary artist or ‘maker’ reflect on a now well-popularised colonial battle story from the vantage point of her own post-colonial present? Is it possible to develop a critical medieval aesthetic in a context of the recent groundswell of medieval fantasy representation?
Old English thematics and narrativised saxon histories appear to be distinctly unpopular departure points in high art and craft, if and where the distinction of ‘highness’ can still be drawn. In the nineteenth century, Pre-Raphaelite painters and poets of Rosetti and Burne-Jones’ circle were able to collapse the distinction of high and low, past and present into dreamy medieval nostalgias and disturbing russet palettes. These distinctive painterly legacies later transmuted into the sinuous Guinivere lines of Art Nouveau glass and craftware. By the end of the nineteenth century, the firm lines of Victorian neo-Gothic architecture had also softened into the gentler, more organic, craft based medievalisms of the British and Viennese Arts and Crafts movements.
Fantasy fiction is of course, the new bastion of generalised, often imaginative medievalisms that seem to be magically annexed from any relationship to real saxon colonial legacies as we know them (read Jean Auel, Cecelia Dart Thornton, et al) As these medievalisms have proliferated and commercialised across film and literature, the re-inscribed old English content certainly loses sight of its cultural, tribal, and historical specificity. This may not always be a bad thing. It seems to me that many populist confabulations busily set out to convert ye olde into action oriented yee ha, sometimes with highly original results. These film and novelised texts generate evocative, if thin portraits of histories that may otherwise go untold. Other times, they locate us someplace that is both ungratifyingly sentimental and intolerably dur, between backcombed bravehearts, landscapes of tinkling crystals and runish plot confusions.
These days, visual artists seem loathe to tackle old English iconographies and their latest inscriptions within popular genre forms. It may not be that they are afraid to risk the forms and stories of an English past, but that they are afraid of risking a capitulation to its more kitsch simulations; or even worse, of making a link to pasts that draw a through-line to (English) agents of colonial displacement. In terms of funding institutional multi-cultural objectives, artworks proposing olde English subjects, may, in recent times, have been seen as merely ‘bad ancestor games’. As an artist, I found it interesting to incorporate these ‘anxieties’ into the process of early discussions and making with the play’s director.
Eminently Anglo-saxon, Melbourne playwright and director Jane Woollard is strikingly aware of these sensitivities and complications. They have not stopped her pushing ahead with her desire to tell the story of one of the few women depicted in the Bayeux Tapsetry. The enigmatic Aelfgyva (pronounced Alfgeeva ) is one of three women in the Bayeux tapestry, a seventy metre long, embroidered wall hanging made in 1070. Woollard was particularly interested to think about the tribal and gendered nature of Norman and Saxon skirmishes, shifting attention away from retrospective projections of nationhood to the perennial themes of clan displacement and dislocation. In the original tapestry, the figure of Aelfgyva is shown positioned next to a ‘certain cleric’, framed within a small tower. The tapestry, of course, was made to commemorate the Norman conquest of the English. Some scholars argue that the Normans forced the gifted English craftswomen to the task of crafting and imaging their own defeat. In 1066, Halley’s comet, depicted as a ‘hairy star’ in the tapestry main frame, went across the sky, four months after Harold Godwinson was crowned king of the English. This was seen as a sign foretelling disaster for Harold’s reign, which did in fact come to an untimely end with his death at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. We remember that the comet passed into the company of our own eyes in 1986, a tangible link between past and present.
Woollard originally perceived this music theatre project as ‘a meditation on time, conquest, landscape and love’. Woollard’s distinguished musical collaborator, Stevie Wishart, has reflected how the script with its frays and tears and ambiguities, encouraged sound to encroach from all directions (‘The abstractions of the hurdygurdy, its creaks, its airy turning mechanisms, the scraping of its wooden wheel as it bows gut strings, the clacking of its tiny keys’). Wishart says that these ‘noises’ became the filmic sound effects of the drama (‘The sharpness of a needle, ancestors from across the sea, the wet-mouthed screams of battle’). Yet she was also fascinated by the weave of scored and improvised sounds; seeking to find a contemporary process metaphor for medieval musicians who were themselves both skilled readers and generous improvisers.
Inevitably, as you might imagine, the scenic design was called upon to reflect these sonic spaces. Like the images in the tapestry itself, many sounds cannot be notated or understood. This became an apt metaphor for the visual process. There was a point where the literalism of the early thumbnail sketches failed, not least because of the budgetary constraints. The set designer, after a long meditation, conventionally needs to open the drawing and modelling process out to the challenge of building a space in which the sonic, poetic, physical and emotional spaces of the story can come alive. The process of drawing and model making, from rough scale model to a more resolved scale model at 1:25 scale, does not emerge solely from a studio process. The first ideas are subjected to substantive change when the designer participates in the rehearsal process, bringing drawings, rough models and even a dynamically conceived storyboard into the realm of bodily storytelling and kinaesthetic trial and error.
What became fascinating to me in rehearsal, were the director’s efforts to use the hieratic gestures of the original tapestry figures as part of the movement ‘dance’. The actors inhabited two-dimensional, quasi-romanesque shapes of grief and wounding right in the middle of their naturalistic interchange. Equally, lyrical dance and stepping motions were built into the story, evoking not merely journey and quest across the green battle hill, but a sense of the figures come to mortal life. Ergo, the ground and backdrop became important signifiers. The symbolic threaded plastic mesh which we used for the tapestry cloth became a theatre curtain. It also functioned as a memory of the Bayeux linen, and as the flat pictorial ground from which the actor’s bodies emerged.
For example, the character Aelfgyva, played by actor Margaret Mills, was threaded into the backdrop at the play’s beginning. She was released to action, (to the enactment of mythic and personal memory) on a wide but narrow endstage, that contrived to delimit the depth of field, and emphasise the stylised motions across the space. At various points in the drama, the actors would play against the cloth in active ways, resuming silhouettes from the actual tapestry, then releasing back to ‘normal’ action with a residue of the formal poses always haunting the onstage moment.
The tapestry was not materially figurative; it had become a less interesting, and less affordable choice to ape the ‘effects’ of the tapestry and its exquisite materiality. The script suggested that we build a more dynamic slew of design elements as a way of enriching the layers of history and memory. An industrial woven canvas was stretched across the stage with raw materials in the form of overscaled spools, threads and needles available for the use of the ‘makers’ or players. Richard Vabre's lighting design, with its overscaled, distressed grids and patterns, was calculated to emphasise the imprisonment and the freedom of the weave.
The actor playing Aelfgyva was in fact the only literal maker of these figurations; looping in and around the green hill threaded across the plastic; she also used the loose onstage threads to search for the character’s dead love, pulling them out and threatening to pull the whole cloth down. Her actions symbolically activate the memory of what the cloth was, and what it might have become; time present and time past meld as the singers and actors weave in and around the events in search of conclusive identity and an apt form of remembrance. The official story of the cloth is constantly played off against other suggested interpretations.
In the end, themes of displacement and loss rise to the surface as the image of something made and then unmade and made again. The sonic landscape of live and recorded sounds augments and sometimes determines the visual ‘making’. In this play then, there was no particular hierarchy of theatrical elements. Half pop-clip and half formal poetry, the musical, physical, spoken and visual forms layer against each other. The design elements contributed to a pattern that evoked the construction of a historical document, and the range of historical voices that may or may not have been represented there.
Aelfgyva was performed at the Autumn Music Festival in Early May.
