"Gifts of the Furies" Performance

The Gifts of the Furies on May 7th & 8th, 7pm at Newcastle's Maritime Centre, Lee Wharf, Honeysuckle Drive.

Flyer 

Written by Glenda Cloughley

A Jungian analyst, composer and singer from Canberra, Glenda will give two performances of the story-song with fellow musician, choral conductor and singer Johanna McBride (including relevant local material). This two-handed version is a prelude to the possible larger production of the BIg Furies at a future date, which will incorporate an inclusive local People's Chorus. To this end a free singing workshop will be held on Sunday morning 9th May, following on from these performances, and inviting all of us to find our voice. 

A STORY SONG FOR CITIZENS IN A CHANGING CLIMATE

We change lightbulbs and showerheads to turn back the weather;

We reduce re-use recycle our things

But our children’s nightmares - Who will stop those?

And our sterile anguish - Who will shift that?

Join us in May 2010 for two Newcastle performances of The Gifts of the Furies.

The Passion of our age is revealed in Glenda Cloughley’s dramatic story-song. In this first Australian artwork to recognize the mythic scale of the climate change crisis we see what happens when people raise the mortal laws of cities above the immortal laws of nature. We may also discover that our own voices could move us from tragedy to reconciliation as we find a place in the citizens’ chorus.

 The way is shown by Ethos, spirit of the community, and the song-man Aeschylus, whose law songs of 458BC were motivated by the same hard questions and longing for harmony that hum beneath our days.

 COMMENTS ABOUT THE GIFTS OF THE FURIES

"I was gob-smacked by how good The Gifts of the Furies was. It’s an extremely interesting and very beautiful piece".   

Paul Collins, religious affairs commentator and writer, on ABC Radio 2CN, (after premiere performances with a cast of 50 in the Great Hall, ANU).

"The new two-person performance is a tour de force! Glenda and Johanna are top-flight musicians and convincing actors. They took us to ancient Greece and back to present-day Australia, paralleling the current climate crisis with the terrible deeds enacted by Clytemnestra and Orestes. Don’t miss it!"

Judith Clingan AM Composer-conductor

"It’s my hope that remarkable works of the eco-prophetic imagination, such as The Gifts of the Furies, will be able to bring an axe to the frozen sea within us, to recall Kafka. For as we’re reminded by Ethos, ‘lament is the start of renewal’".

Kate Rigby. Associate Professor, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University.

This project is highly original for several reasons:

• The Big production of the Gifts of the Furies is designed as a participatory performance work that can incorporate many levels of performer experience and capacity, from rudimentary knowledge to complex choral skills. To this end, it is perfectly designed to engage a “citizen’s chorus” – invoking a concept of community music-making and citizenship that is inherent to the meaning of the work.
• It is a large-scale work, conceived as musical story-telling on a mythical and epic scale that transforms ancient ‘song-man’ traditions into a contemporary artistic practice. This practice crosses the boundaries of music, music drama, ritual and epic poetry, all located strongly within a sense of place and tradition.
• The work addresses contemporary political issues and social concerns related to climate change. By drawing on artistic traditions of song-story-telling and myth, the work touches ethical, social and psychological issues of serious concern to a contemporary audience.  While the work began life from the perspective of Jungian analysis, there is a sense in which it has developed its own life-force or ‘voice’ as an artistic and collaborative expression of an idea.

$25 ($15 concession) or donation at door:  ENQUIRIES EMAIL transitionnc@optusnet.com.au  PHONE 0414 408956

Buy tickets online at http://www.trybooking.com/EAS

Extensive review:

The Gift of the Furies Experience, March 2009, by Bronwyn Goss

I wonder if, like me, there are many others who carry an enduring ache for the earth as we live with the prospect of climate change. Sitting just beneath the surface, yet sinking deep, this ache is too much to look at all the time. No words to speak it all - all the love for children and Earth - and grief for what might happen to precious life.

Where is there a place to mourn the silent disappearance of species, the salinization of a sweet creek, barren, dusty paddocks, the imminent migrations of island populations?

I sat in the true-pitched choral harmonies of the premiere performance of The Gifts of the Furies in the Great Hall at ANU on Sunday 29 March, and felt my ache being taken up, drawn out, given shape and sound; an articulation fuller than words. The aeolian tones of the storyteller’s melody carried my sorrowful anxiety for the future along into more specific emotions expressed through the music and dramatic movements of this new imagining of an ancient story, The Oresteia. It tells what happens when power and hubris set the ‘mortal law of cities and people’ above the ‘immortal law of earth and sky.’

Glenda Cloughley has written a most profound musical work which defies genre classification. She refers to it as a story-song, which aligns it somewhat with the mode of indigenous traditions (and their purpose in the maintenance of proper societal affiliations and relations between people and earth). Around Cloughley’s unifying role as the selfaccompanied storyteller, are gathered choral songs, solos, small vocal ensembles and instrumental dynamics. A narrator calls the key movements of the work, while the ‘citizens’ chorus’ sing their concerned commentary into the present time double of the drama. Specific entities such as Gaia, The Furies, Lord Reason and Ethos, are realized in idiomatic portrayals through choreography and costume. These powerful presences have been keenly visualized by Madeleine Blackwell.

Cloughley’s guitar and voice have a continuing, integrative purpose. As a counterpoint to this, the texture and character of carefully selected instruments – piano, violin, cello, dulcimer, base dulcimer and percussion, animate the emotional shifts of the story. In the program, Cloughley acknowledges the numerous professional artists who perform the work without fee “because of their commitment to community art-making and their belief in the need for urgent change in our social climate.”

The two premiere performances of The Gifts of the Furies on the Sunday and Monday nights, in which A Chorus of Women were joined by Wayfarers Canberra, were almost sold out. A Chorus of Women has risen in Canberra, as a phenomenon of our times and its place - a city state at the centre of Australian democracy. ‘Our times’ constitute an increasingly politically savvy and educated population impatient with spin and hubris who are longing for wisdom from decision-makers. And A Chorus of Women has become known for their synthesis of this emotionally intelligent citizens’ voice that speaks through original music and theatre into the concerns of our age. Wayfarers, led by Canberra’s musical genius and inspirational creative spirit, Judith Clingan AM, added sweet young voices and rich male tones to the warm Chorus sound. Clingan was also joint Musical Director with Johanna McBride, and they were assisted by another Chorus woman of diverse musical talents, Meg Rigby.

McBride, whom Cloughley acknowledges as the creative midwife to her opus, is a consummate pianist in her own right. But it is McBride’s intuitive musical fluency that elicits such a vitalized sound from the singers under her direction. Her own ringing mezzo voice working with the confident soaring soprano of Clingan and the rich alto of Cloughley make for some ecstatic moments in the performance.

The work of A Chorus of Women is famously collaborative, but The Gifts of the Furies is Cloughley’s heart-child which A Chorus of Women with Wayfarers, have enabled to find its form. Cloughley is an Analytical Psychologist, and significantly, one whose natural intelligence and compassion looks to cultural psyche as well as that of the individual.

This leaning encouraged her efforts to understand the workings of wisdom in The Oresteia. Her composer’s notes in the program quote Jung, The most we can do is dream the myth onwards and give it modern dress. And whatever explanation or interpretation does to it, we do to our own souls as well, with corresponding results for our own well being. Her analytical experience verifies the truth of this and moves her to bring it into being through her own creativity.

The Gifts of the Furies is an eighty minute story-song inspired by a Greek myth; a Western dreaming story written by Aeschylus in Athens in 458 BC. As Jung anticipates, this ancient work finds its relevance in our times. Originating at the beginnings of democracy, it is a wisdom story for cities to mind the balance of laws - of society and Nature. As a portal for the story in Australia’s city state, Cloughley enlists the spirit of the statue of Ethos, by Tom Bass, which stands outside the Legislative Assembly in Civic Square in Canberra. Ethos, being as she is, an image of civilized wisdom like her sister, Athena, in the Oresteia, holds the responsibility in The Gifts of the Furies, of assisting the citizens towards some necessary consciousness – of dreaming the story on.

The story is set in the dysfunctional royal house of the city-state of Argos. Murderous crimes against mothers and children are responded to with horror and rage, not by the law of the state but by the furious spirits of Earth, alerting the audience to the generative double sources of life. So as the story unfolds the audience is asked to carry this poetic metaphor of women and Earth and to hear the crimes of the human story also as crimes against the Earth.

This is helped along by opportunities for the audience to participate as concerned citizens by singing with the Chorus, led by the Cantor and guided by a synopsis of the story in the program. The women sing, Is the Queen’s rage the Fury of Earth? And the men sing, Is the King’s death the Fate of mankind?

The narrative rolls on its inexorable path through the portents of doom in the Furies oracle, “Black dread will bloom in heart’s red blood till green songs grow in the gaze of love” until Ethos brings the protagonists to trial. The matricidal son - defended by Lord Reason - and The Furious Spirits of Earth each present their case to the citizens.

Here the Narrator reminds us that the presence of gods in the court (the ancient Furies of Earth and the younger gods - Lord Reason and Ethos) means “it’s more a trial of Laws than persons”. It’s the embodiment of the conflicting laws in the separate characters of the gods that enables us to make a much clearer distinction between Laws and to see them each as potential ‘Bodies of Law’.

Before white people came to Australia there were no cities. Everyone lived in direct relation to the land. Wongi elder, Josie Wowolla Boyle, says that Tjukurrpa is Natural Law. This is why Yothu Yindi can sing in Treaty, “The planting of the Union Jack never changed our Law at all.” We are only just realizing that the consequences of actions need to be envisioned deep into time and into a network of implications. This might be the reason old Aboriginal law-men deliberate for so long when asked to authorize disturbances to country. This understanding of the inviolability of the Laws of Nature is the teaching of the original drama and Cloughley recognizes its relevance for our times as we face climate change. Although this awareness about Natural Law is vital to the future orientation of law and governance, I think we were longing for even more from this work when we took our seats in the Great Hall. I for one was glad of the little vision of hope in the old Furies curse, “….….until the green songs grow in the gaze of love”.

Does this story-song offer any insight about what it is that will enable the mass attitudinal shift that will drive the wisest and speediest action to avoid catastrophic climate change? When Lord Reason has presented the case for the matricidal son and the Furies have presented theirs amid constant threats to blight the Earth if the decision goes against them, the citizens’ vote in this ‘trial of Laws’ is tied. Ethos castes the deciding vote. After such horrific crimes, our instincts go perhaps towards blame and punishment, so what happens next is somewhat unexpected and feels at first, unsatisfactory. Ethos votes in favor of the young Prince and sends him home to Argos – admittedly a saner young man with the model of Athenian democracy and Ethos’ wisdom to guide his kingship.

But surely the Earth is doomed.

Ethos now turns to the raging Furies, and with dignity and respect, begins her persuasion…….She tells them she will never tire of telling them their gifts. If you heard the voice of the people’s love Would you open the doors of your kindly heart?   Receive their longing? Trust their promise? Would you plant the Songs of Life in their souls?

There is something about singing that opens the heart and this story-song has activated an emotional telos that runs from a sense of doom towards its longing for wisdom. And the audience can hardly wait to sing their promise with the chorus. You wouldn’t believe how good this felt – to sing my citizen’s voice into this archetypal healing track.

We love our children. We will care for the land. Please come and dwell in our most sacred places. Your loving gaze is our source We are held by the songs in your beautiful eyes. Sweet golden eyes, sweet olive eyes. Sweet and terrible mystery of Life, You see us, we sing back our love. And the Furies turn their Kindly Face towards the people.

The wisdom of Ethos lies in her love for her people and the Earth. Her justice transcends crime and punishment, and attends to what will best restore people and Earth to their right relationship. As with our own climate change circumstances, it is our loving gaze upon this dear Earth and the absolute realization that “out of (her) treasures come children and fruit” that will enable us to transcend the dynamics of self interest and instead to work in comity with each other in restorative action.

The Gifts of the Furies is Glenda Cloughley’s own wise and compassionate gift of cultural  therapy against the dilemmas of our time. It now needs to do its work amongst us all.

Bronwyn Goss is an artist who writes about art and the creative process. She is a lover of the Earth, and is a West Australian who lived in Canberra from 1998 to 2004 and during that time participated in many performances by A Chorus of Women. Since 2004 she has lived in Perth and remains engaged with Chorus endeavors, joining them in performance when she can. She was delighted to be in the audience for the Gifts of the Furies on March 29, 2009.