Dalston songs
Victoria Ward, Monday, May 05, 2008

I was lucky enough to go and see Dalston Songs at the small studio theatre at the Royal Opera House on Saturday. By Helen Chadwick (Composer and Creator, it’s useful to note as we struggle with what titles to put on our spiffy new Sparknow business cards) it’s an astonishing work called an ‘a cappella theatre song cycle’.

Helen lives in Dalston, quite a harsh part of East London, and interviewed her neighbours – Palestinians, Columbians, Turks, Kurds, Serbians, Irish. She asked each of them to speak of home and to tell her what it means to them. She also asked them to sing songs they knew. And then wrote songs, some directly from their words, some to variants of the tunes they sang, which are presented in a choreographed show set in a Dalston cafe (full of blackboard mispellings of the ommellette’s and capuccino kind). Fragments from the interview, with the interviewee speaking, weave in and of the song cycle, making for something compelling and utterly heartwrenching.

Nawroz Oramari, a Kurdish singer-songwriter, lamenting hello, in what I suppose is a Kurdish ululation of grief, down a telephone to a family left behind was one of many moments which moved us all to some new place of complex relationship with the idea of home, displacement, dispossesion.

This, to me, is oral history and composition at its best. And it’s the kind of thing that should be performed as the central piece in a government policy-making day on immigration, to bring the voice and feeling of immigrants fully into presence with the cool analysis and strategy of policymakers. This is what narrative, culture and performance should be doing in an organisational and government setting, not just a bit of add-on storytelling for the management team.