Amelia McConville speaks with Jane Deasy, director & composer of Kaperlak, a music theatre piece featuring texts from Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. The show ran in the Pearse Centre as part of the Tiger Dublin Fringe Theatre Festival earlier this month.
Can you give us an overview of what Kaperlak is about and what form the show takes?
The first part of the show is a prologue which is performed as a radio piece, very inspired by Lars Von Trier. I’m also using text and documentary clips from David Attenborough. He says things about humanity and animals that just jump out at you. Things like “the animals in this great wilderness may live and die without ever coming into contact with humanity”. Sentences like that are just amazing.
After the prologue there’s the act, which I perform in. The concept is kind of like a bell jar. There isn’t a bell jar on stage, but there is a circle. Basically the prologue sets up a scenario in which the world has ended due to our mistreatment of the earth. The act itself takes place in a version of the world which has been effectively ended. So it’s an individual’s view of the world ending or the having ended – looking back and asking what has happened. The music in the second half creates the landscape.
Music and theatre are the two mediums that I explore concepts and ideas through, and the soundworld of this piece is a way of exploring its concept. Working with two forms of performance-based mediums is very challenging and interesting because you get to explore where the two meet and work as one thing, and this is where Kaperlak fits in. What I aim for is creating a performance that is something, rather than just about something. I suppose that’s what we are starting to call music theatre nowadays – it’s a very interesting movement that came out of Europe, and I’m very influenced by it. Especially Heiner Goebbels, who writes about postdramatic theatre and the opportunities that come out of it to create a space for experiencing ideas and concepts.
Did you start with the music or the texts when assembling the piece?
It’s like having one fully formed idea in your head – you know where you want to get to, but you still have to go through a lot to get there. I don’t actually know where I begin – I know what the sounds are that I want to make, I know what I want to hear and see. It’s about finding the most interesting things to put in there. I was really inspired by Plath’s The Bell Jar and Woolf’s The Waves. They both communicated something to me that I had felt strongly before reading them. Plath’s language and descriptions really resonated with me – the way she would describe something as simple as walking down the road, and then finish the paragraph with something like “I felt like a hole in the ground”. A really short sentence, banal language, but it’s extremely cutting. You realise that feeling like that wasn’t a big deal for her, even though it’s a traumatic thing to say about yourself.
Is that feeling from The Bell Jar something that you tried directly to represent sonically in the piece? For example – the way Irish musician Benjamin Dwyer recorded an album influenced by Ted Hughes’ Crow poems?
Not exactly – there are elements like that that kind of come about naturally, and they can be really disturbing and dark and uncomfortable, but there are parts of the score that are really harmonic and nice too. It’s not too inaccessible! I actually know Ben Dwyer – our pieces are similar only in the sense of finding a sort of beauty in the darkness.
How did you select the words for this piece?
There were certain lines in both texts that just seemed to say “use me!”. It felt like a conversation with Plath and Woolf – like they were telling me to use these lines. I love the idea of a collage. I think I approach theatre like a composer – everything has to be written down in fine detail about how it will all work. But in rehearsals you have to have changes and shifting because of cues and stuff, so there I approach the score more like a theatre piece. Finding a way of putting it together and directing it is really challenging, but it’s great.
Can you talk a bit more about the Woolf influence?
I was mainly influenced by how Woolf interacts with nature in the novel – her descriptions of the earth and the trees and the waves and the sky and sun. In first line of the book it says “the sun had not yet risen” – and ‘Kaperlak’ means “time of darkness”. It’s a season in Greenland when the sun doesn’t rise, so they live in darkness for half the year.
Did Greenland influence the piece much? Have you been there?
No, I actually haven’t! There’s another element to the show influenced by Greenland – which is nature documentaries. I’m obsessed with them. There’s one called The Village at the End of the Earth, about the village Niaqornat in Greenland. It has a population of 59 people, and they mostly still live by ancient inuit tradition. This documentary focused a lot on younger people living there who have things like Facebook – this place only got electricity in the eighties! They talk about “kaperlak” in it – and the the expression “time of darkness” really stuck out to me as being so powerful and simple. So I thought there has to be something I can create about a human darkness as well. That’s where Plath and Woolf came in. The Bell Jar is traumatic but it’s one of my favourite books ever. And in The Waves the nature language stuck out to me so much – I wanted to use that kind of language. And I wanted to explore the disconnect between us and our natural environment.
Is there a longing then in this piece to feel connected with nature?
Definitely. It’s something I believe we really miss in our lives. I need to be in nature. I love cities but there’s something meaningless about them – friends and work are the things you latch onto in cities.
How many performers are in the show? How was it working with them?
Three musicians, and one actor. I use extended techniques as well as conventional playing techniques, but mostly we don’t use what you’d usually hear from an instrument. So you take a violin and you explore the different ways of playing it, that aren’t going to produce just a note. Eanna Brennan, the violinist, is extremely into theatre and an amazing musician – she makes a really good sound, and it’s one that I want all the time, so I’ve worked with her lots before. Emma O’Reilly is our singer who is a dream and just so giving. We all know each other from studying music at Trinity. Alex Peck is our percussionist who is such a superstar – I just emailed him because I knew he was interested in playing contemporary music, which can be hard to find sometimes. All of them care so much about the overall sound of the piece, and are so willing and open, and have been amazing to work with. There’s also a bass drum in the piece, a vibraphone, and crotales.
I use graphic scores, we don’t use bar lines and we don’t use time signatures – I hate bar lines! So it’s a very visual kind of writing. The musicians have to read from a full score and not from the part so they can all follow each other and there is no conductor, the ensemble just work with each other by looking at each other. The extended techniques come into play and are written in the score – there are effects like growling and throat singing, and scratch tones too. It’s a graphic array of music, I write a score so it looks like what it should sound like.
What sort of space is Kaperlak going to take place in?
It’s going to be on here in the Pearse Centre, where I have a residency – there’s a theatre in the back here, which is one of Dublin’s best kept secrets. It’s a great spot – a small basic black box theatre. I was so excited when they brought me in there first, to have my own space. We’re going to transform it a bit – we’re halving the audience capacity so we can use both the stage and the floor space – we need that much space to perform it properly.
Do you think you will record Kaperlak?
It’s a big question – I don’t know! It’s a live thing. I think you would lose something in a recording. The radio piece from the prologue could stand alone as a piece of music. But you wouldn’t be getting the effect of the musicians walking onstage in their costumes, and being these weird creatures from the future. It could stand alone – but you would definitely be missing something from the overall effect.
