We have always invented the universe in our image, animistic, ecclesiastical, mechanised, anthropic. We live now in the epoch of self-recognition. We are the dawning of the universe upon itself.
Rebecca Elson, A Responsibility to Awe.
It is enough that they show us what we have made of them for us to realise what we have made of ourselves.
J.P. Sartre, Preface to F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.
1.
Begin with the question ‘where am I?’ Proceed to the question ‘am I alive or dead?’ Perhaps you hover between the two. Rilke said that angels don’t always know if they are amongst the living or the dead.[1] Perhaps you are an angel now? You feel yourself to be in extreme danger. Crushed into something broken, bright, twisted, unstable. You cannot tell if the sounds you hear are voices, or the thing in which you are trapped. There is metal, creaking and falling. And wind. And calling. Someone is calling out. Perhaps it is you? An opera; an installation; a long moment – waiting for rescue, or release, an ending, a beginning. An experience rather than a thing performed. A sculpture. An un-virtual reality. Every opera you attempt to make begins, one way or another, with this scenario. Precarity and entrapment are your comfort zone.
‘Who sleeps upon a flame shell bed,
Captures, in tranquility,
The souls of Men new-drowned, those dead
All cradled in futility
Who danced upon the Witch’s Step,
Cleaving to felicity
Soon fell from high estate and wept
Under /‘
In the opera ‘If I shed my skin at the edge of the sea …’, which I began writing last year with the composer Electra Perivolaris, a flame shell bed, a living reef off the coast of the Isle of Arran in Scotland, grounds the portrayal of a mythical creature – a Selkie – in something real, tangible and contemporary.[2] Discovered in December 2020, the flame shell clams and the reef they construct are truly there, lying between 5m and 30m beneath the surface of the Atlantic. The Selkie, a creature of Scottish folklore blessed with the gift of therianthropy, returns to a beloved coast. Weak, hungry, pregnant, she is apprehended and detained by the authorities of the coastal community. Her ability to transform – from seal at sea, to human on land – becomes not a source of wonder and fascination but merely the thing that makes her ‘other’. The opera contrasts a minute elaboration of the physical and mental circumstances of her incarceration with the role of her antagonist, the Precentress; unquestioningly at ease in her environment and in her righteous endeavours.[3] Drawing on ethnomusicological research evidencing 400 years of exclusion of women from leadership roles within Free Church worship, and the 21st century decline of Gaelic psalmody as integral to religious practice, we position the Precentress at the centre of her coastal community.[4] Her spiritual vocation catalyses the detention and tragedy of the Selkie; her choral leadership of people, press and environmental scientists delivers another layer of narrative. Throughout the opera the memory of the flame shell bed recalls for the Selkie a zone of safety where she need never define or justify her existence – home.
As the first line of the ballad with which the opera opens ‘Who sleeps …’ is a statement, a declaration of origin and ownership of heritage; here, in this essay, it may perhaps be a question. Through the multidimensional narratives of the opera, I consider personal and universal notions of feeling at home, or not, and how these notions might be mirrored, or countered, through performance on stage. The ‘You’ within these pages is a consequence of avoidance of the autobiographical.
For the Selkie the words relate her origin myth – of Selkies being the souls of drowned sailors, or non-sailors, forced to take to sea. The second verse, the basis of a more complex arrival story than simply ‘a stranger arrives’, refers to an inland formation of two rocks, The Witch’s Step, on the mountain of Caisteal Abhail. Another part of Selkie folklore involves Selkies coming to the shore to shed their skins and dance as girls; it is to this that our protagonist refers, a place on-land to which she has previously travelled in her human form, and which now stands, for her, as a metaphor for hubris and straying too far from home. I found my ballad worryingly simplistic, but ’Under’ is a point of amputation, sea from Selkie; Selkie from sea. Captured, and held, an abandoned ballad rhyme ‘Under electricity’ perfectly suggested, to me, the imposition of surveillance and other technologies of containment she now endures at the hands of the receiving community.
Our story observes the seeking after a definition of the nature of this mythical creature; the forensic examination, through legal, philosophical and societal enquiry, of what a Selkie is – whether creature, or human; deserving of the rights of personhood, or not. How this migrant, arriving by sea, anticipating welcome, compelled to shed their skin and become a different person on land, is verbally and physically interrogated beyond the point of being torn apart. Mythologising the real, we do not focus on the perceived beauty of the Selkie through the human gaze. There is no romance; no eager land-bound man ready to trick her into wifely duties. Instead we attend to what her alien status means; how the community concentrates on her body as a source of information. Her teeth; her lost foetus; her shed skin. They treat her body as if she were a corpse. Essentially she is dead to them from the moment she is detained.
2.
When you were young and eager in pursuit of operatic art you made grand statements, took a theoretical position, declared the existence of ‘a paradigmatic relationship between dissociation and opera, with each being the ideal construct of, and venue for, the other’. You drew on multilingualism, as an extension of this dissociative vocal scaffolding. In your texts you split language. Kind and thoughtful people ennobled your naive efforts by likening them to “the creation of a distinctive meta-language through the inflective possibilities of the operatic voice, opening up inter-textual channels, and exploring the multiple resonances of text”. Now, perhaps, you no longer know what you meant, or intended, beyond the simple wish to give voice to the diverse personas within any given operatic character or entity. Perhaps you wanted to hide behind impenetrable sounds. Surely disguising one’s meaning is the ultimate act of non-compliance? It is certain that you feel most at home in obfuscation. Where does it come from? The most important childhood conversation? The questioning of your knowledge of the spelling of your name? Disbelief with regard to your rights to ownership of your mother tongue? Court 114? And so “….raxing yourself to daith….” you cleave to works that challenge meaning through language.[5] Obfuscation is your fondest resource.
In a November 2020 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival Artist to Artist conversation between the composers Clara Iannotta and Cassandra Miller one phrase, shared and considered between them – ‘the voice and what it feels like to sing’ – struck me with particular resonance. I had been thinking about a related issue, without being able, precisely, to locate the nature of my question. In the context of operatic narrative one person makes a sound with their voice, another receives that sound and reacts to it. (And the sign language interpreter on stage ensures that audience members who might not receive the sound are equally enabled to comprehend the vocal gesture.) But how does a voice feel when it has no expectation of being heard? Listening and not listening trouble this opera. What it means to need to be heard. What it means to be incapable of comprehending ‘the other’.
What is the process by which a person is denied their personhood? What is the site of contention? Here, it is language and ownership of language. The Selkie / human distinction was always going to be language-based. The issue of not speaking the same language as an interrogator is always assumed to be the difficulty. But what if you are? In earlier work I have attempted to address the performative metaphor of dissociation in opera through the use of multiple languages by a single character, to reflect a breakdown in their awareness, identity, memory or perception. This piece evolves that thought by exploring the perception of a single language by opposing characters on stage.
The central tenet of the narrative is that the Selkie and the community are speaking the same language, but the Selkie, neither invisible nor inaudible, so definitively (unwillingly, involuntarily) represents ‘the other’ to the community that they find it cognitively impossible to comprehend that she is speaking at all, despite her eagerness to communicate with them. Were communication possible she would tell them she had been born within sight of this land. They rely instead on tests, and interpretations of results of the tests they inflict on her. And asserted knowledge of the marine site from which she might originate. And – eventually – interrogation of other experts. And historical notes. And past cases. And hearsay. And myth. Ostensibly they interrogate her physical being, but their complete cognitive incapacity to acknowledge that she is speaking simultaneously prompts and negates all other investigation. Through experience, exposure, conversation (sometimes over decades) we have, individually and in collaboration, explored and reflected on the experience of migrants, and perceived outsiders, both historically and contemporaneously, who find their personhood denied through questioning or dismissal of their use of the receiving community’s language, and refusal to credit the veracity of their statements. The ultimate tragedy of our Selkie is rooted in our own limitless, entirely factual engagement with such situations.
3.
George Lewis has said that writing operas and composing librettos is ‘basically an epistemological project’.[6] And so – what is the role of the audience? What is their work? How much should they be encouraged or permitted to feel at home in the auditorium? If fragmented narrative, non-notated vocalisation, rejection of linearity, silence … leave an audience puzzled, discomfited, mortified, destabilised, are these things done in order to call up these same reactions, from these same people, outside, in the world? What if, as opera maker, you wish them to be made as self-conscious and only conditionally welcome as you are so often forced to feel in life? Is this the real meaning of ‘sonic tension’? Perhaps, if through all your adult life you seem never to have been without or far from precarity, imposing it on audience members is as close as you will ever get to feeling at home in the making of a thing that will be heard. Still, isn’t it precarity, situational or psychological, rather than passion, that drives operatic drama? This Selkie is an emanation – an embodiment; trapped, voiceless for unfathomable aeons of time. Just as the Precentress is another you, logical, adversarial, destructive. Each at home in their separate, staged worlds. But Rilke … How destabilising to learn that angels also, even angels, do not feel at home in any world; they too exist in a state of precarity.
Why are they singing? What drives these people to express themselves thus? How at home are the characters – human or otherwise – within the concept of staged drama? Isn’t a person on a stage judged and valued according to how comprehensible they are? But if they are always seen, always heard, always confident that some chain of consequences will flow from their prescribed actions, who, or what, exactly, do they reflect?
In ‘If I shed my skin at the edge of the sea …’ we have created a world where the natural language of each of the parties is song, with the drama arising within the societal / musical confrontation between two modes of communication. On the one hand there is the Selkie, whose mythical language is traditionally held to be music. On the other we have the Gaelic psalmody of coastal communities in the Western isles of Scotland, and the practice of precenting. Adapting the unaccompanied congregational psalmody of religious ritual to the secular world, our Precentress ‘puts out’ phrases (and philosophies) which are taken up, re-interpreted and expanded by three congregations constituting the local community she leads both spiritually and chorally. Musical tradition is, here, demonstrably an expression of identity and / or cohesive community. These people, representing opposing local factions and far away conflicting jurisdictions, all feel at home in their expression of their thoughts. Their congregational singing is a timeless thing – unending and unchanging. It reinforces the hard, unending torture of the trapped and unheard Selkie. Through this form of delivery recitative and aria as means for the communication of emotion become almost unnecessary – it is the relentless sounding of this implacable group voice that disempowers and condemns the Selkie. The Precentress is the central force. Because she exists, the opera pits groups, not individuals, against the Selkie. Each congregation is an impenetrable community – making the Selkie’s isolation all the more definitive.
This unequal balance of power extends to the use of pronouns within the narrative; who gets to say ‘we’ , who can sing only ‘they’. Inescapably, the Selkie / migrant is focused entirely on her possible futures amongst the receiving community – what ‘they’ think and what ‘they’ will do to her. Caught in a liminal state, she is always on the point of becoming, achieving transformation. Selkiehood offers two different states – neither can be fully achieved while she is held. The community, conversely, focused on their own actions in the present, perceive her only as ‘it’. Becoming almost irrelevant to their discussion and positioning relative to each other, she is merely the object. The Selkie remains alone in her light, the community separate in theirs, each occupying opposing sound worlds.
4.
‘Home’ is a cold, converted blending shed in a Northern English town, where, seated amongst strangers, you watch a young man begin to chip and shave away the exterior of a cello made of ice.[7] Attending to this activity, at first blandly expecting a spectacle; then excitedly startled as – the tools increasing in ferocity – dark-dyed shards skip, skitter and hurl themselves towards you; gradually united in concern for the man and his unceasing effort, these strangers become, for two hours, ‘family’. Another day; on your screen you watch a handful of characters in a filmed opera, characters with no reason to like or trust or understand one another become, in the face of global disaster, all of humanity; an internet cafe the centre of our shared universe.[8] Ice, communication, others – all we need to save for the building of another home.
Borders – liquid, cognitive, anthropocentric – all ultimately meaningless, define territories in the opera, as in life. My composing collaborator, Electra Perivolaris, has spoken of the island on which we imagine the Selkie being held as ‘characterised by multiple layering silhouettes of land across the water which come in and out of focus with the changing weather’, surrounded by ‘many conflicting currents which pull the water in multiple directions’. Time, land and seascape exist, in the opera as in the world, outside the control of human beings who believe only they can rightfully belong on a particular patch of earth …
Engaging with the overarching conception of the Earth as home, we have found that almost nothing need be invented. The marine environment is naturally a focal point for a coastal community – whether they reside beside the Mediterranean or the North Atlantic sea. The world of sea mammal research, populated by oceanographers, ecophysiologists, bioacousticians, population ecologists throws up its own metaphor laden language and vocabulary – ‘platforms of opportunity’, ‘estimates of absolute abundance’, ‘possibilities of exquisite adaptation’, and environmental science has a voice in every debate; only overridden by the voice of business. Scientists, in the opera, are the main point of contact with the Precentress. Community concerns about the Selkie bringing disease reflect a seal pandemic in the 1990s. In November 2020 Oceanographic Magazine reported from The National Trust, Blakeney National Nature Reserve, Norfolk, ‘UK grey seal colony experiences ‘baby boom’, prompting new research techniques.’ On Dec 11, 2020 the flame shell bed was discovered. On Dec 29, 2020 the BBC News reported ‘Atlantic discovery: 12 new species hiding in the deep’. They had ‘eluded discovery because the sea floor is so unexplored … Researchers warn that the newly discovered animals could already be under threat from climate change …’ Carbon dioxide absorbed by the ocean was said to be ‘causing coral skeletons in particular to corrode’.
Our Selkie claims that the environmental depredation of her marine environment was not the motivating factor in her wish to revisit the land. But eventually local fishermen find themselves pulling up dead sea creatures, seals amongst them. Deep sea fishing and human generated pollution are the cause of this. The fishermen echo the headlines they and we have read in our newspapers – Oct 31, The Times ‘English Channel fishermen fear hauling up migrant child’s body’ Matt Coker, a charter fisherman, said … “No one wants to see a dead body, do they? Maybe it will turn up in someone’s nets or it will drift past. That is just an awful thought.”
Female seals have been recorded as living for up to 46 years; detained migrants have been held in isolation in Britain for years. This opera covers decades – while the community, and wider interests, interrogate, examine, argue and gradually lose interest in her. Of course we start with a creature who, from the moment of detention, separated from the sea, is increasingly not at home in her own body as she loses the ability to return to her seal form.
Perhaps it is no surprise that the Selkie has provoked so much recent creative interest – as the natural world becomes more and more unruly and we seek ways to protect ourselves from the consequences of our own actions. We have noted several other contemporary treatments of the Selkie myth, including: the BBC Radio 3 Drama ‘Sea Longing’ BBC, the Radio 4 Drama ‘Islander’, Monique Roffey’s award-winning novel ‘The Mermaid of Black Conch’, and an as yet untitled work by artist/filmmaker Tanoa Sasraku – all of which have come to our attention only since we began making this piece.
The duet with which we began this project is a prototype; the particular eco-dramaturgy, in form and material conditions, of an opera requiring large vocal forces inevitably suggests an opening out of the cast to include non-professional singers, all the better to emphasise the raw, improvisatory quality of a congregational chorus of untrained voices, and to contrast with the other-worldy sound of our mythical Selkie.
[1] “Engel (sagt man) wüßten oft nicht, ob sie unter Lebenden gehn oder Toten.” Rilke, Duino Elegies, The First Elegy, Trans. Martyn Crucefix, Enitharmon Press, London. 2006
[2] If I shed my skin at the edge of the sea … Libretto for opera duet commissioned by the Royal Academy of Music, London, 2020. The starting point for this piece was the composer’s wish to combine the mythologies of her dual Scottish and Greek heritages. We found a shared point of reference in Scottish ancestry – my song lyric John Creary’s Imperfect Journey, (music by Clare Elton) took as its subject my own Scottish great-great-grandfather.
[3] Precentor, n. Also -ter, presenter, presenttor, prezentor. Sc. forms and usage, in the Presbyterian churches: an official appointed by the Kirk Session to lead the congregational praise. The office was freq. held by the parish schoolmaster. The precentor is still occasionally to be found in the remoter areas of Scot., esp. in the outer islands, in churches where there is no instrumental accompaniment to the singing, and in the smaller Presbyterian denominations where instrumental music is disapproved. Gen.Sc., obsol. Derivs. precentorship, n., the office of a precentor, precentorial, adj., pertaining or belonging to a precentor, precentress, n., a female precentor, a precentrix, in 1892 quot. used jocularly of a singing-teacher. First recorded in O.Sc. in 1586 in reference to the director of music of the services in King’s College, Aberdeen, then in Presbyterian usage in 1649, from Lat. praecentor, one who leads singing, praecinere, to sing before. Dictionary of the Scots Language. 2004.
[4] We are grateful to Dr Frances Wilkins (Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen) for directing us to this body of knowledge.
[5] I am thinking of, amongst others: Donald Campbell’s play The Jesuit, from which the quotation is taken; or Aaron Cassidy’scomposition ’I, purples, spat blood, laugh of beautiful lips’.
[6] International Contemporary Ensemble, Afro Diasporic Opera Symposium 2021, Act 2, Sc 3.
[7] Seth Parker Woods, Spencer Topel, Iced Bodies, ice cello & electronics. Bates Mill Blending Shed, HCMF, November 2019.
[8] The Murder of Halit Yozgat, Composers Ben Frost, Petter Ekmann, Librettist Daniela Danz; Film Ben Frost, Trevor Tweeten. Staatsoper Hannover, Holland Festival. Prototype Digital US Premiere 2021.
By: Oge Kpalukwuozu-Nwosu