A lot of things in theatre, music and art generally have been nipped in the bud due to the coronavirus. Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Arts, under its Culture In Quarantine banner, working with the Arts Council and the Space, have tried to find a new and gorgeous audio and video life for such projects.
One of them, 1927 Theatre’s Decameron Nights, is on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 3 this week and thereafter on Sounds. There’s also an added sonic dimension available through Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Taster, which will allow a deeper and many dimensional sound experience. All-in-all, between us, we’ve created an immersive and absorbing feast of audio storytelling for our times.
Boccaccio’s Decameron itself is a glorious depository of medieval tales of love and lust, the everyday and the extraordinary, the macabre and the benign, as a group of people shelter from the plague outside Florence in Italy in 1343. Each night in quarantine involves ten tales being told. It’s a brilliant vehicle for the power of story and the skill of storytelling, and within its pages all human life in its glory and vainglory is there.
Enter . A fabulous company that in normal times mix live performance with animation, telling compelling stories in a way that draws you into strange, beautiful and often scary worlds. Their show Roots is a telling of ten ancient folk tales, some of which appear in the Decameron, and was devised with their usual gripping visual style. Then the virus hit and the premiere and all performances were cancelled.
Decameron Nights is their answer to their own quarantine: a new oral telling of the ten stories that were in Roots, full of atmosphere, music and menace. If you have a sofa hide behind it, but the sound will find you wherever you are. It’s a beautiful example of how to translate storytelling designed for the stage and give it a new dimension and in doing so animating the mind through a carefully sculpted soundscape. It shows the power of storytelling and of sound to paint mind pictures. The three episodes - I’m Alright Jack - stories on the theme of selfishness (and featuring the greediest cat you’ve ever seen or heard); Heartstrings - on love - and Lady Luck - on fortune - all deal with human foibles through the power of story and characters animal, human, devilish and divine.
These short plays show the power of audio and reflect our need to be telling stories in strange times - or perhaps more so because we are in such times. Like the originals in Boccaccio they reflect our sense of humanity and our need to let our minds wander to the bizarre, dark and irrational places that reality tries to hide from us.
Thank you to everyone who made these remarkable works possible. And do try the added sonic dimensions offered on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Taster! Go on, give your ears and mind all the dimensions in sound they are capable of and link hands with our fellow humans who sheltered from the plague and told stories outside Florence all those years ago.