Projects - Taliesin
Taliesin
In 2007 Composer Sianed Jones and Video Maker Henrietta Hale were given a Creative Wales Award by The Welsh Arts Council to produce Taliesin – a 3 screen Performance / Video Installation. Diversions Dance House at The Wales Millennium Centre hosted Taliesin for a 6-day research period, and its debut performances in 2009. Taliesin sold out in Aberystwyth Arts Centre and is now confirming dates across Britain and Wales.
“Taliesin actually offers the perfect arc of a well structured song cycle, much depending upon Sianed’s skill as composer and vocalist. The voice is not pretty. Nor does it pretend to be. The voice is full of earth, grit and power. Its range is impressive, physically, emotionally, and dynamically…….
She is in turn musician, shaman, rock-chick, folk singer, harpist, storyteller and diva, performing with voice, violin, harp, bass guitar and harmonium. The music itself travels effortlessly through a seamless variance of genres.
The overall effect here is one of dreamlike impressionism, the sung ancient Welsh being, I am told, quite indecipherable to modern Welsh ears. In the absence of a direct comprehensible narrative we are being told a story that appeals subliminally to our primal senses and emotions”. Harry Jepson Aberystwyth 2009
The Work
The world of Myth meets History in the name Taliesin
Inspired by the epic singers of Kazakhstan Sianed returned to Wales
determined to work with the ancient 6th century poems of Taliesin.
With a pre-recorded backing track of voices, strings, driving grooves
and wild recordings, Sianed sings the poetry, plays the violin, the harp,
the harmonium, the bass, in a darkened space surrounded by three
screens projecting drawings, photographs, prints, Welsh and English
poetic texts and video footage gathered in West Wales.
Many of the images in the Taliesin poems are elemental fire, light,
darkness, water, wind, the forces of nature. A shaman seeks
illumination by going to a dark place, a faery mound, a cave, a well
a lake, a place within or beneath the earth. After a period of time
comes forth into a brightly lit place either by fire or sunlight.
Taliesin uttered his first song after being released from the darkness
of the crane bag (where he had floated for 40 years) into the light.
His name means Radiant Brow.
The video footage, the drawings, the prints are not narrative
representations of the poems but rather an exploration of the
natural world – the refraction of light as the body moves through
water, embers of a fire, reflections of reeds dancing in the wind,
the curling smoke of a cauldron. The images are designed to evoke
the other world of shape shifting, magic, the cauldron of inspiration
and the shaman here glimpsed as an underwater swimmer.
The text embedded into the projections gives a visual experience
of the voice chanting, speaking, singing the ancient Welsh poetry.
The rhythms, the abstract sounds, the melodies, the harmonies driven
and shaped by the language.