'What Every R&D Should Be': Hattie Naylor reflects on our Finland residency
Last week, the Dido's Bar creative team spent a week as artists in residence at Meidän Festivaali in Finland.
During the week, they worked on our 2022 gig-theatre reimagining of Virgil's Aeneid with an international collective of musicians and actors (Riku Kantola, Tuukka Leppänen and Samira Brahmia), culminating in a public sharing of the work-in-progress.
Playwright Hattie Naylor here shares her experience of the residency, musing on the production's relevance and its power to resonate with international audiences.
Seven days in Finland, courtesy of the Meidän Festivaali and Globe Art Point.
by Hattie Naylor
There are few experiences as exciting as creating work in a room with fellow artists that are not only brilliant but also like-minded, generous and truly collaborative. And for me, there was a further pleasure in this exchange – in that we are all of differing nationalities. Samira Brahmia, a superlative French-Algerian singer and composer; Tuukka Leppänen, an utterly brilliant and committed actor, singer and musician, who is Finnish; also Finnish, Riku Kantola, an equally gifted composer, music producer and multi-instrumentalist; Marouf Majidi, originally Kurdish-Iranian and now a Finnish citizen and outstanding composer, multi-instrumentalist and performer; and the utter brilliance that is our director Josephine Burton. This diverse team from all over the world gelled in a way that is uncommon in the arts.
In the calm of the Finnish woodland, spacious rehearsals rooms and lakes, we began to create what I feel is a stunning piece. For me, it is already amongst some of the finest work that I have been privileged to collaborate on.
During this week, my work as a writer consisted of writing in response to others with prompts as we built the structure together. I also contributed suggestions of my own. I would, with consultation with Josephine and the team, either write in the room or in my accommodation, depending on how complex the next scene of lyrics was.
The text ranged from lyrics to dialogue between characters and what I would describe as spoken verse or prose. This gave the work a texture as it moved through different worlds - the world outside the play that is the Venus and Juno as narrators, the dialogue between Aeneas and Dido, and also Venus and Juno as managers of the bar. The work felt effortless because of the team. I would disappear or stay in the room and write what was usually right for the next moment of the piece. We wrote six songs together, two re-worked and one yet to be completed.
It is not finished yet, but in that week, we created the beginning of a show that I believe truly addresses the current refugee crisis by reimagining a very old story. The audience was moved, some to tears. Carl Jung referred to such tales as archetypical stories, stories that sit inside us as a shared memory. When you apply such a story as The Aeneid and the story of Dido and Aeneas within it to the refugee crisis (both Aeneas and Dido are refugees), you can, in the right environment with the right fellow artists, create a resonant world viscerally searing in its intensity. If you can move an audience so completely, as we did in the sharing of the piece at the end of the week, then this means the final production has the potential already to be riveting, compelling, moving and utterly relevant.
Thank you, Dash Arts, for an amazing week.
