Cherry Potts's Blog, page 8

Once more into print… Clockwise

Now, anyone who had anything to do with Solstice Shorts last year will know how much I like a good time theme. So I was delighted to find SolarWyrm‘s Latchkey Tales and their current project, Clockwise, a series of journals focussed around different times of day: this time Midnight Blues. So I sent them a story, and they have published it.

The Midwinter Wife takes place over the longest night of the year, in  town of ancient origins  south of London, and is a sort of Rip Van Winkle in reverse, with midnight playing a key role, obviously.

I noticed that Cathy Bryant (one of Arachne Press’ Poets) is also in Midnight Blues, pleasing to be in good company!

Anyway, you can buy a physical copy  (kindle version to follow) or you can subscribe to the entire series, (electronic version or physical ) which is much cheaper per copy, or (and?) you can buy the omnibus later in the year…

In other news: I am currently typesetting my monster-book – The Dowry Blade, ready for publication in February 2016. Until I finish typesetting, I don’t know how many pages,  (around 576) until I know how many pages I can’t get a quote from the printer, or finalise the spine width for the cover designer, so I am concentrating very hard. Surprised at how much I am enjoying the process!

Here’s the cover, (by Lucy Reynolds) uncomplicated by spine calculations…

How Idomeneo looks from here

The audience are never going to experience an opera the way the chorus does. Even though performance in the round gives them some idea, as they peer through the crowds to catch a glimpse of th action, but actually, the action is what they are peering round.

Our chorus experience is  sweaty, loud and partial – we never get to see the whole show, but the bits we do experience are visceral.

escaping the monster IdomeneoBH copyright Robert Workman

This is quite a physical show, and we are very glad that the carrying corpses off stage was cut, and we weren’t convinced we’d manage it without injury, to us or the ‘corpse’. The costumes are very hot (winter weight flying jackets with 2 inches of wadding in them, gas masks…) but at least there are no quick changes – last year’s nun-to soldier-in-3-mins is mercifully not challenged for award for fastest change. The emotions change faster, one minute a concerned civil servant,

concerned civil servants IdomeneoBH
copyright Robert Workman

the next an anxious guard,

Anxious Guards – IdomeneoBH copyright Robert Workman

then a cheery well-wisher (although an imagined one!)

Imagined well-wishers IdomeneoBH
copyright Robert Workman

and finally a zealous follower of Poseidon turned vigilante – (no photos of this, will have to see what we can do in the dressing room!)  but there is a lot of anger throughout, I just have to remember what I’m being angry about and ‘on whom rest the blame’.

If you would like to discover who is to blame, we are performing again tonight at 7pm and on Sunday at 2pm. tickets and info here

Orchestral Manoeuvres

One of the delights of being involved in the community opera at Blackheath Halls is working with the Blackheath Halls Community Orchestra. We don’t get to hear what they are up to until the sitz probe, when we run through the entire opera and work out the corners. This is one of my favourite sessions, because we rarely hear the whole work. Then we get two stage & orchestra rehearsals and a couple of dress rehearsals (two of everything because of the split between the schools we are working with) to get used to what the music sounds like full on, before the first night.

Sitz Probe

And very necessary it is too, when we’ve been working with a piano accompaniment up until then. Jeremy, our assistant musical director plays a cut down version of the orchestral score magnificently, and it doesn’t always seem possible that he has enough fingers.

I wonder how much attention the audience pay to the orchestra, there is so much going on in an opera, although they are at least visible in our production.

I know I listen differently as a performer to how I would as an audience member – ear tuned to the instrument that will play the note I need a bar and a half before I have to sing it, that sort of thing; making it hard to take in the whole, but two things really struck me last night during the first performance of Idomeneo.

One was how very full and brassy the sound is considering how little brass there is playing – Mozart makes fantastic use of horns, but that’s about it.

The other was during a brief interlude when the tenors & basses are up with the orchestra for our ‘off stage’ chorus of drowning mariners during the storm. We all creep on and lurk at the side and wait for our cue. This gives us an unusual ‘conductor’s eye view’ of the orchestra. I can’t imagine the concentration and eye for detail it takes to conduct an opera, with orchestra soloists and chorus to pay attention to – I couldn’t even begin to make sense of the full score. Nick Jenkins, I salute you! Anyway while waiting for the music to cue us in,  I noticed these waves of movement going through; not the documentary film cliché of the bows all moving at the same time (although of course they do), but for example, a point at which all the violins put down their bows as one, and plucked the strings instead. It was an incredibly elegant little movement, which delighted me – and then I had to get on with singing and had no thought for anything but coming in correctly on the tricky bit…

 

Who are all these people?

We are a reading household (there’s a surprise) and an oft-quoted  exclamation, when one of us, uninvited, reads an extract from the current book to the other is ‘Who are all these people?’ I think it’s from a Peter Nichols play but I could be wrong – we are also very poor on attribution.

So it is something I’ve been thinking whilst we’ve been rehearsing Mozart’s Idomeneo. Assiduous readers of this blog will know that I’m not averse to plundering Homer myself, and Idomeneo is set in the aftermath of the Trojan war, so naturally I’m curious as to the source of the story.

This opera was first performed in 1781, and Mozart’s librettist Giambattista Varesco seems to have borrowed heavily from an earlier 1712 opera Idomenée by André Campra (I’m listening to it as I write) libretto by Antoine Danchet, who in turn borrowed from a stage play of the same name by Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon performed in 1707.

Idomeneo (Idomeneus) King of Crete (Grandson of Minos in case you are wondering) does appear in The Iliad occasionally, and comment is made on the vast size of his fleet (relevent to the plot!). He has a tricky journey home like so many of the Greek allies, and in order to be saved from drowning promises to sacrifice the first person he sees, who is, of course, his son – it wouldn’t be a Greek tragedy otherwise.

Rehearsals: Preparing for a sacrifice

I’m not sure this is in The Iliad, but in all the other versions of the story I can trace he does  kill his son (Idamante in this version) either as a sacrifice, or by accident, and is then banished either by the Cretan’s themselves as a murderer, or driven mad by Poseidon.

So where do the women come in? Neither Ilia not Electra appear in Crébillon’s play, and Ilia seems to be a completely 18th Century invention, she is not mentioned in the Iliad, and the only person of that name I can find is a daughter of Aeneas who would presumably not have been born at this stage in events (hark at me going on like it was real…) In this version she is one of Priam’s many children, shipwrecked from one Idomeneo’s many ships, along with the rest of the Trojan captives. As for Electra – daughter of  possibly the unluckiest family in the history of time…

In case you don’t know, she was the daughter of Agamemnon (brother of Menelaus whose wife was Helen, married to Clytemnestra, sister of Helen – keep up!). He sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia (Electra’s sister) to get favourable winds to get to Troy in the first place. When he got home from the war, Clytemnestra killed him, and then Orestes, their son (Electra’s brother) killed Clytemnestra.  (according to Sophocles and Euripides, since you ask) After that it gets murky as to what goes on with Electra, but various options are open including her becoming a kidnapper, or a quiet marriage to a cousin, but in none of them does she end up in Crete in a jealous fit of pique at Idamante’s adoration of ‘Trojan Slave-girl’ Ilia, as she does here, and in the Campra version. Hey ho, that’s Opera for you, as if there isn’t enough going on already, there has to be someone driven mad by jealousy!

There are several editions of the Mozart opera in any case, with varying inclusions and omissions so I shan’t give you clues as to the ultimate fate of poor Electra.

Come along and find out what happens in our version, under the direction of James Hurley, and how we manage the sea monster (did I not mention the monster??)… tickets here

It’s about to get loud…

If you’ve been thinking I’ve been a bit quiet lately it’s because I’ve been so busy.

One of the things I’ve been busy with is the Blackheath Halls Community Opera. We are doing Idomeneo [Mozart] this year and it is tremendously singable – lush baroque music to make you weep with joy at the cleverness of the harmonies. But Idomeneo is a pretty bleak tale of ill thought out promises and monsters (some of whom are human) and sacrifice. Our production is blood drench and stark, a bit of a shock after last year’s gloriously silly Count Ory.

Normally I do a blog through out the process but it’s not been possible this year – too much else happening. So this is it, really. First night is TOMORROW. tickets are going fast – especially this morning apparently the phones at the halls were red-hot, possibly down to being previewed in the Sunday Times & the Telegraph, though modestly(!) I’d like to think its down to us flash-mobbing Blackheath Village yesterday during our lunch hour from dress rehearsals.) You can buy tickets (unless we’ve sold out already…) online here or by phone on +44 (0)20 8463 0100.

There’s a thunderclap with about 15 mins left to run to hit the target, JOIN IN NOW!!!

Pretending poetry, songs of liberty and Ursula le Guin

The thing about running your own business is that holidays become almost entirely theoretical. It’s a holiday to leave the computer for long enough to hang out the washing on a sunny day, it’s a holiday to take the long way to the post office, it’s a holiday to read something that isn’t for work, or to listen to something that requires your full attention on the radio, or to take a day to learn new songs.

The thing about running your own business is that you can build a holiday in anywhere you want to, and around anything you want to, and justify it as ‘work’.

So a week in Cumbria because one of the poets in The Other Side of Sleep had organised a reading in Grange-over-Sands and it’s too far to go and not stay over, and if you have to stay over, well…

A few days with friends in Bath and a stop over with another on the way to Cheltenham.

So I briefly pretended I’m a poet last week. As I said whilst doing so, I am not a poet, I occasionally write poetry, it really isn’t the same thing. So here’s me pretending to be a poet, with one poem and two flash fictions that happen to kind of work as poems.

https://cherrypottswriter.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/grange-over-sands-cherry.mp3

If you want to hear how real poets do it you can listen over on the Arachne Press website. I’ll be pretending again at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival on Saturday in the company of Angela France, Math Jones, Bernie Howley, Kate Foley and Jennifer A McGowan.

In the meantime I’ve been listening to Ursula le Guin on Radio4, first an epic 2 hour catch-up with The Left Hand of Darkness, and then a 30 minute documentary, with the woman herself, and various writers who admire and were influenced by her, including Neil Gaiman,  Karen Joy Fowler and David Mitchell. I found myself falling in love with LHD all over again. I read it first in my teens, and again about 5 years ago, and I am in awe of le Guin’s talent and the subtlety of the adaptation for Radio by Judith Adams, everything I remember is there, and the bitter, bone deep cold swells through the recording so, so well. Listening to Gaiman and Mitchell say words to the effect of ‘this is why I became a writer’, I wonder: is this why I became a writer? (and unlike ‘poet’ I do identify as ‘writer’ because even when not writing I obsess about it – think about my characters, interrogate my bad habits, consider plot twists, discover great titles in over heard conversations…) and I think the answer is probably YES.

The Left Hand of Darkness has been one of  my favourite books since I first read it, and unlike many others was even better on the second reading, and still made me cry (and I think another re-read is due). Discovering it so early, probably about the time I began to seriously think I might write ‘for real’, it must have had a huge impact. It is hard to tell, I read voraciously at that point, three books a day at weekends, back to back, swimming in words. I’m sure I amalgamate many of those books in my mind, not sure what comes from where, but LHD stands out from the morass, as do other of le Guin’s books: The Tombs of Atuan and The Lathe of Heaven in particular. They are doing an adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea (My first ever le Guin read, when I was probably nine or ten) on Radio4 Extra next week – LISTEN!

Did you think you were going to get away without a reference to music? Ha! fooled you.

I spent Saturday immersed in songs about making choices and community and freedom, taught by the marvellous Lester Simpson in preparation for the next ‘big idea’, a celebration of Magna Carta in the week of the actual 800 year anniversary of the first draft being signed (if you ignore the change of calendar in the 18th Century). Nearly 50 people turned up and we sounded amazing. Here’s a sample…

https://cherrypottswriter.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/step-by-step-all.mp3

You’ll get a chance to hear the songs we are working on in a more polished format at West Greenwich Library, 7:30 on Thursday 18th June. More on that nearer the time. There is a call out for STORIES for the event over at Arachne, you have til Mayday.

Right. Off to my next ‘holiday’, in Bath for readings of Solstice Shorts at Oldfield Park Books, this evening!

Blackheath Brundibar

Brundibar, the children’s opera by Hans Krása, was performed many times by children in Theresienstadt concentration camp, and the music is very much of the time, wandering from tango to ragtime with overtones of Kurt Weil. This rather sombre historical note is echoed in the pre-show performance by Trinity Laban’s Colab singers, with songs actually written in Theresienstadt, with their final song segueing straight into the opera.

There isn’t much plot, two children – Joe & Annette are sent out to find milk for their sick mother, but they have no money. They spot Brundibar raising cash playing a barrel organ, and hatch a plan to make the money for milk by singing. Bundibar takes exception to them muscling in on his action, and threatens to have them jailed. All the children, and some animals, gang up on him, and eventually Joe and Annette manage to get milk and all is resolved happily.

In our Blackheath version Brundibar is played by Nicholas Merryweather, in some rather alarming makeup, with me, Alix and David as henchies, going about with buckets demanding money with menaces. This necessitates some seriously ghastly fake leather coats (hench-coats, as Alix has dubbed them), our habitual army boots and a lot of sneering and posturing. We are having a lot of fun!

 

 

Alix in Hench-coat, takes a break from demanding money

The main roles are taken by Adam Music and Rebekah Smith, but the children are the stars – especially those playing the animals – wonderful sparrows and a magnificent cat who has a voice I could listen to all day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It wouldn’t be a Blackheath production if there weren’t some kind of construction job as part of the action -Harry Fehr always gets us doing something complicated in the summer opera, and James Hurley does likewise here, with walls built of suitcases.

The costumes for the animals are wonderful, and our sparrows actually get to fly…

The first night last night went past in a flash, but we are on today at 2pm and 6pm, and tomorrow, Thursday 2nd April at 6pm.

All Rehearsal photos copyright Cherry Potts 2015

 

 

readings this week

Busy week again, singing Monday (Vocal Chords mid-project ‘stop-over’ concert)  and Sunday (rehearsing Brundibar at Blackheath – more on this later), teaching Tuesday, reading Thursday and Saturday.

So the readings are:

Thursday: Holdfast Anthology Launch details on the Facebook event, if you want to come, join the FB event, so the organisers know how many to expect. Holdfast published my story Earthshaker in their second online edition, and have now crowdfunded a print anthology of everything that was in the first 4 (I think!)  online editions, complete with illustrations. I will be reading a 5 minute extract. It looks rather like if you want a copy this will be a rare opportunity to get your hands on one, most of them were pre-sold.

Saturday: Arachne Press event at Keats House – readings from The Other Side of Sleep, and discussion of Narrative Poetry. I’m not reading personally apart form a cheeky 30 second thing, but I am taking part in my role of editor of the book. Readings from Alwyn Marriage, Jennifer A McGowan, Bernie Howley, Sarah Lawson and  Math Jones.

 

LGBT History Month reading at Richmond Library

It’s taken me a while to get round to posting this, as there’s been other things on my mind.

https://cherrypottswriter.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/richmond-lgbthm-cp.mp3

Here I am reading at Richmond Library in February, complete with interventions from planes on flight path to Heathrow!:

Arachne’s Daughters (with Alix Adams) from Mosaic of Air

 

 

 

A Place of Departures from Stations

 

 

 

Neutral Ground from 52 :Loves

Portrait of the Artist’s Model as a Young Woman at Liars’ League HK

Brad Powers and Saffron Chan reading Portrait… (rather well!) at Liars’ League Hong Kong for True & False.