Taliesin- Something to say About Sianed
Something to Say About Sianed
What there is, is a woman, alone, singing and sometimes playing violin, harp and harmonium. It is a cavernous black space, and we are invited to sit, lounge and make ourselves comfortable on the various carpets and cushions that are strewn about.
She will sing us a story. Her voice carries over loudspeakers and mixes with various sounds of her own voice that have already been recorded, and the sounds of instruments. Various beats underpin the stages of her story, and suddenly for a moment it is just her alone with her violin.
Three white screens mark the edges of the space. Three different kinds of video projection create the landscapes that are the backdrop to the stages of her story. Images of water, swimmers, rising steam and clouded horizons give the atmosphere of shamanic dreaming and shape shifting that are the core of the sense of the story.
What Sianed has done is wilfully and skilfully appropriate the ancient welsh texts of Taliesin to create an experience that has the feel of being in the presence of a bardic storyteller – maybe we are hugged up together in a yurt on the plains of Kyrgistan – but without any of the pious homespun hippy ethic of more straight forward storytelling. This is an elegant arrangement of contemporary media that sends us right to the heart of the tale, which is the storyteller’s voice as she sings. The experience is ecstatic, ancient and resonantly now.
Simon Thorne Composer Cardiff