Film Stills – Daniel Warren
Hanna Tuulikki: Reflections on listening back
The performances of Away with the Birds back in August, still feels like a dream, a collage of sensations, overlaid, one on top of another – the breeze fluttering the pleats in our costumes; the drizzle passing in a slow band across the harbour as we sang, voices rising and falling as rain-smirr settled on our hair and skin; breaths turning in-wards and avian calls embodied out-wards; the rhythmic dance of our song flocking, meeting a skein of geese overhead; bright red feet as the sun burned away cloud; and, of course, the sense of kinship and shared experience. All these, and more, flow through my mind in no fixed order.
Months later, I'm sitting in my Edinburgh studio, listening back to a live audio recording. I feel as if I am back at the shoreline, my heels in the water as the tide creeps up my legs, waiting for the audience to arrive. A microphone headset and in-ear monitor is firmly rooted in one ear, allowing the vocalists, spread out across the strand, to hear one another intimately. My other ear listens to the sounds of the harbour. Recordings of waves breaking, play through the horn speakers fixed above the water, in an overture that overlaps with the waves of the ‘real’ sea. I feel nervous but, hearing my own breath, I connect it to the motion of the water around my feet. A recording of a red throated diver announces the beginning of the performance, followed by the call of an oystercatcher. I am aware of the sounds of the audience settling, coughing, creaking, shuffling on chairs; the hum of a boat-motor, songbirds singing in the garden of Canna House; and a crow cawing. It feels as though the skin is permeable: the sounds of the island and its elements – the recording includes wind and droplets landing on the microphones – the audience and, of course, the birds.
Away with the Birds is a vocal composition woven together from fragments of Gaelic song that imitate birdsong and bird calls, a journey, through five movements, emulative of birds and their different habitats – shoreline, cliff, wader, flock & skein, and night-flight. Between each, there is an interlude of field recordings representative of the birds. The voices and field-recordings were played through a specially designed sound system – speakers positioned in the sea, on the shore, and in trees behind the audience – immersing the listener.
The women’s voices are different but, together, work as one. We came to think of the composition as an ecosystem, composed of balanced parts, or even an organism, with a spine, flesh and skin. The sum of the parts are greater than the whole. The harbour, our stage, was a natural amphitheatre, where the weather was our lighting and set design. But it was more than that: the island is alive. I am listening to a recording of a live performance in a place that is living. And so it begins.
Vocal Ensemble – Anna Sheard, Hanna Tuulikki, Judith Williams, Kim Carnie, Kirsty Law, Lucy Duncombe, Megan Henderson, Mischa Macpherson, Nerea Bello, Nichola Scrutton
Composer & Artistic Director – Hanna Tuulikki; Producer – Suzy Glass
; Dramaturg & Performance Director – Nic Green
; Production Manager – Nick Millar
; Assistant Producer – Emmie McKay
; Field Recordist & Sound Artist – Geoff Sample
; Costume Designer – Deirdre Nelson
; Gaelic Mentor – Mary Smith; Live Sound Design – Iain Thomson
; Film-maker – Daniel Warren
; Photography – Alex Boyd; Choreographic Development – Rosalind Masson
; Site & FOH Manager – Lucy Conway; Set Construction – Murdo Jack; Pattern Cutter – Annalisa Simonella; Knitting Technician – Christie Alexander; British Sign Language Translator – Karen Forbes; Front of House – Peter McMaster; Song Translations – David Wheatley; Score Transcriptions & Place-name Translations – Alec Finlay
; Gaelic Place-names – Winnie MacKinnon & Peter Drummond;
