ONE of the highlights of the Covid-reduced live programme at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe was Move, a piece staged on Silverknowes Beach by theatre-maker Julia Taudevin.
Presented as the inaugural show of Disaster Plan (the company Taudevin established with her long-time collaborator Kieran Hurley), it sought to reflect on historical and current experiences of migration.
Almost one year on, Disaster Plan are bringing the piece back for a tour of Scottish beaches, from Caithness down to Ayrshire and many places in-between.
Taudevin began thinking about the piece – which combines the spoken word with song – shortly after the world was confronted with the horrifying pictures of Alan Kurdi, the two-year old Syrian child whose drowned body washed up on a Turkish beach in 2015 after he and his family attempted to cross to the Greek island of Kos.
“It was at the forefront of a lot of peoples’ minds,” the director comments, “then it disappeared [from the mass media and social media] quite quickly, as these things do.”
As Taudevin notes, tragedies such as the death of Alan Kurdi continue to occur on an appallingly regular basis in the Mediterranean. Most go unreported or, at least, unnamed.
However, the case of the little Syrian boy became an international focal point due to the painfully powerful images taken of the child’s lifeless body by the Turkish photojournalist Nilüfer Demir.
It is worth noting that – under the latest policy of Conservative Home Secretary Priti Patel – desperate people attempting to cross the English Channel, as the Kurdi family tried to cross the Mediterranean, will be designated, not as refugees, but as criminals making an “illegal crossing”.
Alan Kurdi’s death, alongside those of his mother and brother, led many people – both Scots and people who have migrated to Scotland in recent times – to feed into Taudevin’s research. “People were sharing a lot of their own stories of migration and loss,” she says.
These conversations brought the director “a huge wealth of story and song”, enabling her to construct, “a real picture of contemporary Scotland, who is here and what stories we have here.”
THE devastating images of Alan Kurdi may have impacted profoundly upon the making of Move, but the origins of the piece lie elsewhere. “The genesis, for me, was the desire, coming from Lewis, to connect my Ghàidhlig heritage – those migration stories, and the stamping out of a culture – with other stories of migration,” Taudevin explains.
The director was “interested in mourning and loss” and “looking at rituals that we’ve lost through the erasure of Ghàidhlig culture.” This personal heritage connected with Taudevin’s two decades of migrant solidarity work.
It was always the director’s intention that the work would combine the past and present with ritual, song and storytelling. However, the choice to present the performance in the evocative location of a beach was not part of the original plan.
“It existed first as an indoor show,” Taudevin explains. “Then the pandemic hit.”
With the Covid kibosh put on the planned indoor theatre production, necessity became the mother of invention. It was whilst sitting on Cramond Beach on the banks of the Firth of Forth, as she is wont to do, that the director thought, “screw it! Let’s just do it on the beach.”
It was an inspired decision, given the nature of the piece. The work addresses migration from and to Scotland, both historically and in the modern day.
As such – whether contemplating those, including so many from Gàidhealtachd, who were forced from Scotland’s shores, or the New Scots who have arrived in recent years and decades – the beach is about as emotive a setting as one could wish for. Move is, says Taudevin, “rooted in Scotland, in the ground that we stand on.”
The piece seeks, she continues, to “think about who we are – as a diverse, and ever diversifying, nation – and where we are headed.” The theme of borders is a recurring one in the work.
Borders are conceived of in the broadest terms, not merely in their immediate, geo-political meaning. Move is interested, Taudevin says, in “the borders of the body, the borders of the sea”, and even “the border of the baby as it leaves the mother’s body and into the world.”
Thus considered, the notion of borders is ripe with metaphorical possibilities. It is, says the director, absolutely her intention that the piece should lend itself to all manner of emotional and political readings.
INDEED, she explains, the work draws upon Celtic keening rituals – vocal rituals conducted as part of a wake for the dead. “Keening rituals are shared by cultures across the world,” she adds.
“They are by no means specific to Celtic communities at all.” The purpose of building the piece around something so ancient and seminal as keening rituals is, Taudevin explains, “for us all to access our own grief individually, but for that to be a collective experience.”
Ultimately, for all that Move is rooted in Scottish, Celtic and Ghàidhlig experience, the director hopes and believes that the piece is universal in its impact. The diversity of the song itself speaks to the show’s intended internationalism.
Whilst keening rituals are, of course, concerned with songs of lamentation, Taudevin is keen to point to the musical diversity of the a cappella songs upon which the piece rests. “There are laments in there”, she says, “there are lullabies, there’s gospel.
“The amazing thing about singing is that it’s transcendental. It can take the deepest, darkest, most difficult emotions and move you to somewhere completely different. It can be cathartic.”
Although many of the songs in the show are concerned with loss, they are also, the director says, “hopeful, full of life and vibrant”.
Such an outlook is appropriate to the tour’s dedication to the late Scots-Kenyan musician, singer, poet and writer Beldina Odenyo. A member of the original cast of Move, Odenyo died last year, aged just 31.
Move tours Scotland from June 10 to July 9. For tour dates and further information, visit: disasterplan.co.uk
