PHILIPPA
HAMBLY
SAARI RESIDENCE, FINLAND
KONE FOUNDATION
Jan - Feb 2015
ABOUT
Before history, before culture, there is a human body, grappling with its environment.
In its hand is an axe.
The acheulian hand axe is the earliest tool found to have been created and used by the human species, over two million years ago.
Acheulian conceives theatre as a tool for chipping away at what appears, discovering what is, and inscribing it with this primal intelligence.
Acheulian Theatre is a meeting between physical theatre artist Philippa Hambly and performance maker and art-writer Samantha Jayne Williams. Both work internationally and between cultures and disciplines.
We seek emergent forms that bleed reality and fiction, theatre and ritual. Departing from playful experiment, we make work that responds to current experience.
ANTARES GALLERIA, FINLAND
JULY 2015
Unmasked, began inception as an exploration of the female mask through the Finnish mythological epic, the Kalevala. We were awarded a grant from the Kone Foundation and took up a two month residency in Saari Kartano, Finland.
SUPPORTERS:
THE KONE FOUNDATION
LONTOON MERIMIESKIRRKO
RK BURT & CO. LTD
THANKS TO:
Juminkeko Foundation
The Snowchange Cooperative
Finnish Literature Society
Jussi Huovinen
Maria Iljanko
Mikko Konnto
Dalva Lamminmäki
Antares Galleria
“If we are to remember, we must take things down. Record.”
Can truth be recorded? An archivist digs into the archives to investigate.
Through the epic poetry and incantations of the Kalevala, contemporary and ancient women, prisoners and mystics, arrive to testify. But are they telling the truth? Or do their stories represent another type of myth? Who is recording – and why?
UNMASKED is an attempt to boil down cultural and historical crosscurrents of magic and myth, history and violence to disclose something of contemporary experience. Instrumental in forging a Finnish national identity, the Kalevala is an epic, written by collector Elias Lönnrot, and taken from the 10,000 year-old tradition of the rune-singers of Karelia. Their culture, the poetry that preserves it, and the landscape that birthed it, are under threat.
Photo Sinead Kempley
Photo Sinead Kempley
Photo Sinead Kempley
Photo Sinead Kempley
ST NICHOLAS CHURCH CRYPT
DEPTFORD X FESTIVAL
Sept - Oct 2015
For Deptford X, we worked with sound designer Ben Grant to develop an onstage sound design, which used cassette tapes as a means of exploring the piece’s ideas of technology, recording and obsolescence, and exposing some of the mechanisms by which testimonies are recorded and ‘reality’ created.
UNMASKED is not a staging of the Kalevala. If anything, it is an attempt to point at the mechanisms behind it and, beyond that, something primal and inchoate that seems to lie just out of reach. We wonder whether there may be the place where these things meet, whether that may be where we as a culture need to go next, and how it's possible to get there.
Footage of the drive up to Koli in Karelia, in the east of Finland. Koli is composed of three quartz-capped peaks - Ukko Koli [the old-man sky god], Akka Koli [his consort; goddess of fertility] and Paha Koli [the evil one] - the remains of the Karelianfold, mountains formed two billion years ago.
In the 19th Century Koli's scenery provided the stage set for the Finnish National Romantic movement which also included the Kalevala, first written in 1835 by folklore collector Elias Lönnrot from the sung incantatory poetic tradition of the region. The movement is credited with Finland finally winning independence from Russia in 1917.
The music in the recording is by Karolina Kantelinen, graduate of the Sibelius academy, ethnomusicologist at Helskink University and specialist in ethnic singing styles.
BEHIND UNMASKED...
Written by SAMANTHA JAYNE WILLIAMS, ACHEULIAN – SEPTEMBER 2015
UNMASKED began as a two-month Kone Foundation Saari Fellowship in Finland. Our starting point was the Kalevala - the Finnish national epic, written down and presented as an authored work of literature by 19th-Century collector Elias Lönnrot. Initially an attempt to collect and preserve the tradition of sung incantatory poetry from Karelia in the Eastern part of Finland, it became a totem of Finnish national identity.
Our question became, ‘What do you do when you record?’ Are you preserving lived reality, or distorting it? When you take things down, are you, in fact, dismantling them? We found ourselves caught up in the tussle between culture and nature, sustainability and globalization, orality and text, performance and reality, and the sacred and the profane.
As an artefact, the Kalevala exposes the tensions between written or ‘recorded’ and experiential and performative forms of culture, knowledge and ways of life. The oral tradition behind the Kalevala is rooted in a pre-Christian belief-system in which culture is inseparable from the material and spiritual lives of the people: poetry and song, dreams and lakes, trees and animals, rocks and spirits all participated in the same cultural ecosystem.
The Kalevala has been criticised as culturally imperialist – the capture of a rural culture by urban elites – and its collective tradition, sanitized and labelled as a work of literature, authored by one man, Elias Lönnrot. In some regions, the Kalevala started to displace the singing tradition on which it was based. For others, Lönnrot was the singing scribe, marking the passage of the ancient tradition into modernity, orality into text, and collectivity into individuality.
In order to grasp the significance of the Kalevala, we attempted to reach beneath it, into its origins in the 10,000 year-old ritual structures of the runoja (sung incantatory poems), and the traces of the culture that birthed them. Our research brought us into contact with a culture and landscape under threat, attempts to preserve it, with archivists, activists, cultural tradition keepers, and a rune singer who is the last person to have received the Karelian tradition through the oral lineage. These people shared their own stories and ways of life with us.
MP3 recording of 'Deptford Conversations' post-show audience discussion of the ideas and research behind UNMASKED with Philippa Hambly and Samantha Jayne Wiliams of Acheulian and Tero Mustonen, cultural tradition-keeper, scholar of biodiversity, and Director of Snowchange Cooperative with Kaisu Mustonen. Research conducted with Tero and Kaisu continues to inspire UNMASKED.
From its base in the Kareilan village of Selkie, Snowchange does extraordinary work in the boreal north and in collaboration with traditional communities around the world. Jukajoki, an American-Finnish co-production with Snowchange charts the struggle of two tiny villages to bring together traditional knowledge and the latest science to halt the destruction of their environments caused by industrial mining.
Luistv on Unmasked in DeptfordX:
