A DANCE theatre piece making its premier run at the Fringe is intended by its creator to “introduce death as a part of life”.
The Chosen arose from a period of bereavement experienced by Company Chordelia founder Kally Lloyd-Jones.
Following its run at Edinburgh’s Dance Base, The Chosen will tour the country for a number of dates, many of which will be accompanied by a “death cafe” where people are invited to share their thoughts and experiences of grief and the end of life over tea and cake.
Lloyd-Jones says The Chosen, which is named in reference to Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite Of Spring, says the piece is “about life and living, how we use and spend time, what we cling to and let go of”.
The director created the work in response to a series of deaths of people close to her and says that, though The Chosen is inspired by personal events, “there is nothing more universal than dying – whether it’s our own or our loved ones”.
Lloyd-Jones hopes the show will help encourage people to open up on a subject that everyone experiences but is largely absent as a topic of discussion in modern life.
“When I suffered a lot of bereavements in a short space of time, I really felt the difficulty of being able to talk about it and share it with people,” Lloyd-Jones says.
“I think it’s not something we deal with very well. I wanted to make a piece which represented that and how we live in this very speedy environment where we’re expected to get over things really quickly.”
She adds: “When people say: ‘How are you?’ What you want to say is: ‘I’m really awful, I’m barely holding myself together to put one foot in front of the other’. I felt like there’s a point where you feel you have to say you’re fine, as if your grace period is over.”
Lloyd-Jones, who was recently announced as the new joint director of the Byre Theatre in St Andrews, developed the choreography in collaboration with Katie Armstrong, Thomas Baylis, Amelia Cardwell, Giulia Montalbano, Lewis Normand, Jack Webb: the six dancers who perform the piece.
The Chosen sees the dancers represent members of a village where one is in the position of “the chosen one”, a reference to the sacrificed young woman in The Rite Of Spring. Though selected by fate to die, she is also honoured and revered.
Weaving around that central idea are vignettes inspired by real life, and reminders of the continuity of nature.
At one point in The Chosen, the last performer remaining on stage is swallowed up by a mighty wave, only for the cycle to begin all over again.
The soundtrack features music about death sometimes written during the last years of composers’ lives, such as Richard Strauss’ final completed works the Four Last Songs, composed a few months before his death in 1949.
The Chosen features all but Strauss’ Fruhling, the only one of the four which did not reflect death.
“That he wrote these works about the end of life while he himself was at the end of his life felt very powerful to me,” Lloyd-Jones says.
The soundtrack also features the sounds of the ocean and human heartbeats.
“These are constant reminders of life; our literal heartbeats,” she explains. “With the ocean, it’s the ebb and flow of life and death – the ongoingness of life, how everything keeps going no matter that someone has died.”
The Chosen will be accompanied by informal death cafes in St Andrews, Inverness and Stirling, with more to be arranged.
Swiss anthropologist Bernard Crettaz organised the world’s first death cafe in 2004 to help break what he called the “tyrannical secrecy” surrounding the topic and to help encourage people to make the most of their lives.
Lloyd-Jones has similar hopes for The Chosen.
“People have cried during the show and I feel very touched by that,” she says. “If it helps people to express their feelings or talk about it, I feel like I’ve done something good. I want to introduce death as a part of life; that we should embrace whatever it throws up for us, embrace the fact it’s a part of who we are.”
Until August 25 (not 19), Dance Base, Edinburgh, 5pm, £13, £11 concs. Tel: 0131 225 5525. August 31 Macphail Centre, Ullapool; September 4 Paisley Arts Centre; Sep 5 Beacon Arts, Greenock; Sep 7 Comar, Mull; Sep 11 Eden Court, Inverness; Sep 12 Macrobert, Stirling; Sep 17 Byre Theatre, St Andrews; Sep 19 and 20 Tron Theatre, Glasgow; Sep 21 Brunton, Musselburgh; Sep 24 Perth Theatre; Sep 26 Dundee Rep; Sep 27 The Barn, Banchory; Sep 28 Universal Hall, Findhorn. www.chordelia.co.uk
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