MUSIC / WORDS
THE MUSIC
Now The Hero / Now The Hero extends Marc Rees’ creative exploration and practice in site-responsive theatre by placing a musical element as the project’s core. It will take the form of an immersive requiem realised from an original collaboration by Jóhann Jóhannsson and Owen Morgan Roberts, composed by Roberts.
Rees first heard Jóhann’ music in 2006 at Galeri, Caernarfon where he collaborated with dancer Erna Ómarsdóttir in a piece called ‘IBM 1401 - a users’ manual’. Rees was completely absorbed by the score’s visceral quality and has wanted to collaborate with Jóhann ever since. Johann’s career went from strength to strength and he was in huge demand but Rees finally managed to lure him back to Wales with the intrigue of creating an Immersive Requiem. This was a format that neither of them had worked on before, and presented an opportunity to create something definitive.
Jóhann loved the power of the project and because of his incredibly busy schedule brought in his regular collaborator, Owen Morgan Roberts, to co-create the composition. Together they visited Rees in Swansea and made test recordings at the Brangwyn Hall, which Johann described as being ‘able to dive into the belly of that beautiful beast of an organ’.
In light of the deeply saddening news of Johann’s untimely passing, it is fitting that Owen Roberts will now compose the final work as a completion of their last creative collaborative conversation
We are very grateful to the Colwinston Charitable Trust for their continued support in funding this special work.
‘But if we can get anything from (Johannsson’s) work, it’s that loss can be beautiful, and that in appreciating that, we can preserve something terrifyingly fragile but intensely human, and very, very important’.
Joe Muggs (The Guardian)
THE WORDS
The Gododdin
‘Y Gododdin’ has inspired Welsh artists poets and writers since it was written by Aneurin in AD 600. It is of the oldest surviving Welsh work of poetry, telling how 300 Celtic warriors were assembled from as far afield as Pictland and Gwynedd and attacked the stronghold of Catraeth (Catterick). After several days of fighting against overwhelming odds, nearly all the warriors were killed and the poem laments their loss, while praising their valour and honouring their bravery in battle.
‘Y Gododdin’ was a major influence on David Jones whose epic poem ‘In Parenthesis’ was a response to the carnage he witnessed as an infantryman in the First World War. A quotation from ‘Y Gododdin’ precedes each of the poem’s sections.
Tony Conran’s Poem ‘Elegy for the Welsh Dead, in the Falklands Islands,1982’ opens with the line, ‘Men went to Catraeth’, using the original poem to comment on a contemporary conflict.
Owen Sheers, who has written the libretto for Nawr Yr Arwr \ Now The Hero, was inspired by ‘Y Gododdin’ for his award winning ‘Pink Mist’. Sheers has adapted verses from ‘Y Gododdin’ and shaped them to resonate with WWI.
The influence of the epic poem ‘Y Gododdin’ runs through the narrative of Nawr Yr Arwr \ Now The Hero and has inspired Marc Rees since he performed in the seminal, contemporary reimagining of the poem by Brith Gof and Test Department in the 1980’s.
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GODODDIN - Brith Gof / Test Dept
I've called the libretto a ‘gleaning’ from Y Gododdin as a nod towards both the sense of gathering from a field already harvested (in the case of Y Gododdin, many times by many poets over the centuries) and towards the fact that the shaping influences of this version are drawn from many places. There is also, I hope, the added shadow of the gleaning of a generation of young men in conflict. I’ve tried to keep a suggestion of the original cynghanedd form in the translation, represented by a pattern of mirrored alliteration and assonance. At the same time I wanted this pattern to be irregular, broken, to signify the violence of both the original poem and the fighting of WWI. Although much of the imagery is drawn from the period of the original poem - the 6th century - I also wanted to include references which occasionally telescope the text into the 20th century, and specifically the battle of Mametz Wood, where the 38th Welsh division lost 4000 men. An intended consequence of this is that the libretto should feel strung between then and now - at once ancient and contemporary, and therefore in some way tragically timeless, referring to the idea that violent conflict remains one of humanity’s most persistent failures, despite it also being one of our oldest and most often told stories. We sing the songs written by the ‘only one to return’, but seem unable to learn from their tales of ‘the boys once golden, now crimson.’
Owen Sheers
Owen Sheers is an author, poet and playwright. He has published two poetry collections, The Blue Book and Skirrid Hill which won a Somerset Maugham Award. His debut prose work The Dust Diaries, a non-fiction narrative set in Zimbabwe won the Welsh Book of the Year 2005. Owen’s first novel, Resistance has been translated into eleven languages. Owen co-wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation, released in the UK in 2011. In 2009 he published the novella White Ravens, a contemporary response to the myth of Branwen Daughter of Llyr, as part of Seren’s ‘New Stories from the Mabinogion’ series. His latest novel, I Saw A Man, will be published in the UK, US and Canada in June 2015, and in territories across Europe from September 2015. Owen’s theatrical writing includes the script and novelisation (The Gospel of Us) for National Theatre of Wales’ 72-hour production of The Passion, in Port Talbot. A play created with wounded service personnel,The Two Worlds of Charlie F, which toured the Uk and Canada and won the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award, and NTW’s Mametz. His verse drama Pink Mist, commissioned by BBC Radio 4 and published by Faber in June 2013, won the Hay Festival Poetry Medal and the Wales Book of the Year 2014 and will be produced for the stage by Bristol Old Vic in July 2015. Owen has collaborated with composers on two oratorios. The Water Diviner’s Tale was created with Rachel Portman and performed at the BBC Proms in 2007, while A Violence of Gifts, inspired by a period of research at CERN, was created with Mark Bowden and premiered at St David’s Hall in April 2015. In 2012 Owen was Artist in Residence for the Welsh Rugby Union. His resulting non-fiction work on the Welsh team, Calon was published by Faber in February 2013. Owen also presents arts and literature programmes for TV and Radio. In 2009 he wrote and presented A Poet’s Guide to Britain, a 6 part series for BBC 4 about poetry and landscape. The accompanying anthology is published by Penguin. His other documentaries include one-hour studies of the poets Dylan Thomas and Keith Douglas. His professional positions have included being Writer in Residence at The Wordsworth Trust and a 2007/8 Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. He is currently Professor in Creativity at Swansea University.
NOW THE
PERFORMANCE
Nawr Yr Arwr/Now The Hero is a multi-artform, site-specific project created by Swansea born interdisciplinary artist Marc Rees for 14-18-NOW. This bold and exciting commemoration of WWI will take place in and around the Brangwyn Hall, Swansea during Harvest, September 2018.