The tagline for the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes festival is ‘a multi-arts festival powered by orchestral music.’ This must be interpreted in the context of contemporary debates about how to broaden the audience for classical music, an issue that resonates with the Manchester Collective. Their show ‘Papillons’ arrived in London on 30 April, at the end of the festival. As much of the music presented at Multitudes was standard repertoire zhuzhed up with light shows or film, it was refreshing to attend this genuinely adventurous programme that included new work.
The Manchester Collective was, for this event, reduced to a single player, the cellist Laura van der Heijden, who collaborated with the dance duo Thick & Tight (Daniel Hay-Gordon and El Perry) and composer and multimedia artist CHAINES (Cee Haines). Kaija Saariaho’s Sept Papillons (Seven Butterflies) was the jumping-off point for a programme that also included a three-part work by CHAINES and music by Imogen Holst.
At the back of the dark Purcell Room stage were two semicircles of vertical light columns with a keyboard/electronics setup in front of one arc for CHAINES, and van der Heijden positioned in the centre of the other arc. A large screen hung at the centre back, on which text and film clips relating to the production of the show were projected. We heard the collaborators discussing ideas, and there were occasional alt text-type descriptions of the music, movement, and performers’ appearance. The audience was encouraged to behave and move in ways that made them feel comfortable and, as far as I could see, they behaved exactly like conventional concertgoers, listening and watching attentively. If I had to provide my own alt-text, it would be: Woman in row B, short green dress, long black boots, trying to write in the dark.
Other film clips featured the Camberwell Incredibles, a London community arts service for adults living with moderate to profound learning disabilities and complex needs, who workshopped on the show’s theme with the artists. Their artistic responses and joyous movement were very touching, and several group members were present in the audience.
CHAINES’ new work, oysters sing of silkworms for cello and electronics, took the lifecycle of the butterfly as its theme. I enjoyed their description of the work as a song for the voice of the cello, whose strings, like silk, are ‘combed into different timbres and textures.’ Its plangent, vaguely modal, even folklike opening movement was very much in the cello’s comfort zone, though transformations in the other movements that were interspersed throughout the programme moved into more intriguing territory.
Known mostly as a conductor and educator, Imogen Holst (1907-84) was the only child of Gustav Holst and was part of Benjamin Britten’s close circle, but she has only recently been recognised more widely in the UK as a composer. Van der Heijden introduced her short five-movement Fall of the Leaf (1963) to the programme. Lament gestures interspersed with pizzicati and scurrying characterised the piece, which was placed alongside Thick & Tight’s precise and flexible dance dialogue. The cellist made the best possible case for Holst’s work, beautifully shaping its phrases. After an agitated section that fizzled out, the work ended with a varied reprise of the opening. This part of the programme also featured a discussion between the cellist and CHAINES that was wittily lip synched by the dance duo.
CHAINES’ second movement followed, varying its original material with electronics, a vocoder, and pulsating screensaver-type red, purple, and white images. Saariaho’s Sept Papillons (2000) was introduced with illustrations of some of its many extended cello techniques, and the dancers explained that their choreography was, like Saariaho, inspired by the butterfly, but they deliberately avoided mimicking the music. Sept Papillons was the musical highlight of the concert: it was as if the cello’s resonance was awakened by van der Heijden’s vivid performance. The work’s dedicatee Anssi Karttunen has said that ‘the cello is much richer, in a technical sense, thanks to Kaija.’ What a loss Saariaho is, though fortunately her music lives on.
The programme ended with CHAINES’ third movement, in which the cello was increasingly overwhelmed by electronic sound and reverb as van der Heijden was surrounded by haze and lighting effects. The instrument was eventually replaced with a more powerful electric cello, symbolising the butterfly’s emergence. While the music was quite straightforward, the staging was an essential contribution to the story and van der Heijden’s total commitment to every work on the programme was exemplary. Would I always like to hear these pieces as staged by Manchester Collective? No, I wouldn’t. But their presentation demonstrated that collaboration can take musical works in surprising directions, and today, the message that we can transcend our differences by listening to and working with each other is more important than ever.
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