When John Dowland, England’s nice and gloomy Elizabethan composer, wrote his heartfelt lute songs within the sixteenth century, he reached past the boundaries of trend. Simply hearken to ‘In darkness let me dwell’ and you will be struck by how modern it feels. As for ‘Move, my tears’, which he revealed in 1600, it is one of many longest-serving hit songs ever written, interpreted by singers starting from early music specialists to pop stars resembling Sting. Evidently there’s one thing endlessly fascinating in regards to the relationship between Dowland’s music and intense melancholy.
Or at the very least, that is the pondering of the British opera and theatre director, designer and video artist Netia Jones, who’s spotlighting that relationship in a brand new experimental theatre manufacturing on the Barbican’s Pit Theatre this month. That includes stay efficiency alongside multimedia components, ‘An Anatomy of Melancholy’ takes Dowland’s output as a springboard for an exploration, as Jones places it, of ‘what occurs in our encounter with music of such expressive and excessive magnificence that’s so very unhappy.’
In it we are going to hear Dowland’s music, carried out stay within the spherical by countertenor Iestyn Davies and lutenist Thomas Dunford. However we may even hear recorded excerpts from Robert Burton’s Seventeenth-century treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy, in addition to the writings of Sigmund Freud and the modern British psychoanalyst Darian Chief. That is as a result of Jones believes that understanding our response to Dowland’s music entails viewing it from a number of angles: ‘I used to be on this concept of melancholy, of what melancholy signifies, what it would imply now, and why the time period ‘melancholy’ has became different issues, one in every of them being melancholy.’
For her, these three authors provide acute perception. ‘Burton says there may be nothing nearer to hell on earth than a melancholy man’s life, so he clearly understands the diploma of struggling [that melancholy can bring]’ says Jones. ‘In the meantime Chief displays on the truth that, to a level, now we have medicalised this emotion of melancholy, but in addition that the pharmaceutical business has positively not alleviated it, given the statistics for this umbrella time period of “melancholy”.’
As for Freud: ‘I am not significantly a fan of his,’ says Jones: ‘I feel quite a lot of ladies won’t be. There’s an insistent misogyny all by way of Freud’s pondering that’s inescapable for a contemporary pondering lady and but he explores the thought of melancholy in relation to the thought of mourning in a useful approach.’ Comparable to? ‘He says that in mourning the sufferer is aware of what he is misplaced and in melancholia the sufferer feels the identical feelings however would not fairly know what’s misplaced. So melancholia is presumably a extra complicated set of feelings as a result of it is onerous to pin down.’
Not everyone within the viewers will likely be offered on these interpretations, and that is superb by Jones. ‘I am not providing up any conclusions or hypotheses [on these texts].’ What she does provide, she says, is a chance to replicate on them, and to that finish she has included in her manufacturing a sequence of video projections that eschew the didactic in favour of mood-setting. ‘The factor that has led me essentially the most is the outline of melancholia, present in each Burton and Freud, as feeling submerged; as a way of drowning.’
Extra like this
On the specifics of what we are going to see, she stays mysterious. That, in line with Iestyn Davies, is Jones’s model. ‘Netia and I’ve by no means sat down and mentioned precisely what she’s going to undertaking; she likes to maintain her playing cards near her chest.’ Given that he’s one in every of Dowland’s best-known and devoted advocates, how does Davies really feel about that? ‘There’s quite a lot of belief with Netia. The way in which her mind works could be very neat, tidy and environment friendly and I like that. I can perceive her saying “what I would like you to do is what you do finest; I will do what I do finest, and we’ll belief one another.”‘
Does he belief her to boost the music somewhat than distract from it? ‘Dowland’s music is kind of spare, and throughout the silence there may be area [for interpretation].’ He continues: ‘With music of this era it is easy to fall again into pondering of “hey nonny no!” and other people with large ruffs and tankards. What [Netia] will hopefully do is to take it out of its Elizabethan context and make it sound like nothing written in 1600.’
Davies hopes that this manufacturing will underline what he loves most about Dowland’s music: its skill to appease by way of its very unhappiness. ‘Unhappy songs enchantment to everybody,’ he says. ‘Listening to unhappy music is like a cleaning soap opera or automobile crash on TV. You do not have to truly expertise that factor however you continue to get the cathartic impact of getting lived it. You then come out the opposite facet and you are still alive. It is like having a great cry.’
Jones agrees: ‘A part of the material of the manufacturing is this concept that music gives us understanding, one thing richer than comfort, one thing that enables us to grasp our emotions and stay with them.’ Is that her take-home message? ‘I do not are inclined to formulate the considered what I hope the viewers will take away,’ she says. ‘ All I can do as a theatre maker is create one thing that I am interested by and share it.’
‘An Anatomy of Melancholy’ runs at Barbican’s Pit Theatre from 27-30 October. www.barbican.org.uk
Picture: Lightmap
