Very few of us are now strangers to online events and those creatives such as Ondervinden who have previously brought productions into the heart of our communities are now being challenged to do this online. They were recently granted full Arts Council funding for a week-long online folk music event ‘The Folk Effect’. Through the week 5 folk bands based across the UK will be given just 24 hours to write an entirely original song directly inspired by the one created the day before, in a celebration of creativity and togetherness.
Onvervinden
For those new to Onvervinden, they are a production company that create theatre that draws from folk stories and traditions with wit and imagination, engaging rural communities in intimate settings through touring performance, music, and conversation. The team consists of Artistic Director, Elske White from London who we talk to below, Producer Lucy Morris from the South West and Musical Director Jonathan Ip who is also the bandleader of Glasgow-based Funk band ‘Rambootan’.
The Folk Effect
The Folk Effect is their latest project, a free, online, high-speed music-writing which is event spread over six days in which five folk bands from across the UK will each have twenty-four hours to write a new song directly inspired by the one created and released the day before.
It takes place from 2nd – 7th November 2020 and is streamed at 7:00pm each evening on Facebook, Youtube, and on the Ondervinden website (https://www.ondervinden.com/) – culminating in an omnibus of all six new songs to end the week, in a new folk music conversation.
The event is Free, or donate to support Ondervinden.
The Bands
The bands/artists taking part are:
Hazel Askew – a name that will be familiar to most of our regular readers – The Askew Sisters, Lady Maisery, Songs of Separation – Hazel is also the daughter of two Morris dancers, she grew up immersed in the traditions and tales of English folk music and now takes part in the next evolution of the folk-music tradition: online collaborations.
Twelfth Day – A Scottish duo (Catriona Price and Esther Swift) that should also need no introduction Quebec, Malawi, Brazil, and Mongolia, sharing folk music traditions with local musicians, now find new ways of making, connecting and collaborating online.
The Moonlands –determined to be the first band to play on the moon, The Moonlands are using this new remote virtual-event as an initial step to distanced performance.
Isla Ratcliff – music academic who wrote thesis on the role music played in the 2016 Scottish Referendum, now looking at new evolutions of collaborative folk music sharing process.
Rambootan –spotlight shone on Ondervinden’s music department in an era where theatre is forcibly semi-retired. Music Director’s band RAMBOOTAN leads new online music collaboration project.
Plus…
Commissioned Artist Jo May – emerging artist who creates traditional lino cut portraits of bands for new online folk music event (you can see some of her lovely artwork for this event here: https://www.ondervinden.com/thefolkeffect.
Interview with Elske White on The Folk Effect
How did Ondervinden come into being and what is its connection to folk music?
Ondervinden is made up of three creatives with a love for the wild notes and mystery of folk tales and music. Our first production – our adaptation of ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ was a piece determined to shake off the book’s depressing reputation and focus the story more positively on the love and community Tess finds despite her tragic circumstances. We brought on board a small folk band who became a vital heart of the story – and shaped the telling of it in ways we could never have predicted. As we toured the show in the autumn of 2019 we saw first hand how the music bonded and brought together groups of disparate people who had been strangers moments before. We saw people moved to tears at some of the sadder moments, which we chose to tell without words at all, just with music, and we saw them breaking into spontaneous, lawless dancing during our party scenes. Before ‘Tess’, we had loved to listen and play folk music. Now we saw its effect on a wider group of people, and felt truly impressed by the value and heart it brings to a community. This is the reason we knew The Folk Effect would be the perfect project to bring together not just musicians, but anyone who watches, anyone who engages.
What is the drive behind this project? Where did the inspiration come from?
We conceived the idea for The Folk Effect after a third very disappointing cancellation of a project due to COVID. We had been preparing to tour a folk-style storytelling event around villages in the South West of England. The show was an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, designed for performance in pubs, alongside a live folk band who had crafted the show with us. Not surprisingly every plan we tried to form was halted at each attempt by the developments and restrictions of COVID.
Realising that performance in public spaces was looking like an impossibility, I began to think of ideas that might draw on all the themes of our cancelled projects: community, collaboration and creativity, and so The Folk Effect sprang into life. We wanted an event that brought together people who were physically distant, as our team was, spread across the UK. We wanted an event that would get people creating in direct response to one another, and so we began to shape the chain effect structure of this unique music event.
Our idea was simple: 5 bands, most of them strangers to one another, brought together in one week to speed-write one new song each in just 24 hours, but with one crucial catch – each song must be directly inspired by the song of the day before. There are no rules as to how this inspiration can be found – it might be in the lyrics, it might be in the tune, or a particular style of instrumentation. These are things we will only find out in the course of the week itself.
Will the audience have experienced anything similar before do you think?
This kind of direct inspiration is something we have only experienced in person, in folk sessions, in jam sessions, between musicians playing together in one space. Anyone who has experienced that kind of absolutely spontaneous creativity will know they are the stuff of magic. What we haven’t experienced yet is this kind of magic in an online medium, and this is what we are determined to try with The Folk Effect.
How did you select the artists involved in The Folk Effect?
We wanted to programme a range of artists at different points in their careers, and we also wanted to support the artists who have been such a formative part of the Ondervinden company, so we began by asking the musicians that made up the ‘Tess’ band. We also chose these artists because we wanted to engage musicians who each have a very specific flavour of folk. Tenzin Stephen’s band The Moonlands uses folk instruments, but has an ‘astral funk vibe’. Our Music Director Jonathan Ip’s band Rambootan takes the jazz funk blend with folk even further. Isla Ratcliff’s background in academic study of folk music lends her a specific authenticity which we felt was matched by the established traditional work of Hazel Askew, and genre-bending Scottish duo Twelfth Day mix the traditional with their classical training and beautifully high-pitched voices. Each band has a unique and very clear sense of self, and this was something we looked for in programming more than anything. This project is a virtual conversation of music, and we wanted each evolution of music, as it occurs through the six days of the event, to be representative of the individual engaging in the collective. We didn’t want the week to go by with no recognisable change in the sound, and with these bands involved, that is a certainty, which makes the project both unpredictable and incredibly exciting.
What are the most challenging aspects of the project?
The challenge of speed-writing a song within just 24 hours is a huge task already, added to which they have to be ready to air this song at 19:00 sharp. The song can’t just be complete, scrawled on a piece of paper – it has to be fully performance-ready. For our bigger bands this means they have to tackle the sharing, arrangements, harmonies – for our solo artists, perhaps the pressure might be writing and refining and performing alone.
For me, I think the challenge rests on not knowing what this ‘thing’ is to which they must work directly in response. And there are no limitations on how they can respond. They might be working on echoing one refrain the previous band included, they might be writing intricate lyrics that reply to those of the song before.
What are you most looking forward to?
At the end of the week we are putting all the new songs together in one large omnibus, together with some footage the artist Jo Elizabeth May took of her process of creating the artists’ portraits. In this omnibus we will really be able to see and appreciate the way that the piece we began with at the start of the week has been taken and adapted and evolved through each new song, through the sounds of such unique bands. I can’t wait to see how they respond to the challenges this project poses in the moment, but at the end, when we can step back and see the full piece – the full chain of music that they have created together, but miles apart, that will be my proudest and probably favourite moment.
What can an online audience expect?
Really? We don’t know. We’ve heard some sneak previews of the first starter song, but beyond that, we have absolutely no idea, so I suppose an online audience can expect to be excited, to be surprised and crucially – to be welcomed. The final stage of this project is that we want the audience to respond too, just as each new band, daily, will be responding. The Folk Effect isn’t designed to exist for a week, with just these few isolated artists, it’s made to be spread, to continue, to survive.
2020 has been a year in which creativity has been shut down, cancelled, forgotten, and we want people, individuals to stand up to this: get out your dusty instrument, or your painting set, your dance clothes. We want responses in all shapes, forms, sizes – not just music, but art, dance, poetry. All we ask is that you listen, respond and share.
If you are reading this, questioning whether to engage or not – engage! Creativity doesn’t exist in isolation – it exists in the process of sharing. We hope you will share in it with us.
Dates & Times
2nd-7th November 2020 – simulcast across all our social media platforms at 19:00 BST.
7th November 2020 – Omnibus of all songs released permanently on Social Media and at ondervinden.com at 19:00 BST.
Schedule
Monday 2nd November – Song One – Musician to be revealed…
Tuesday 3rd November – Song Two – Isla Ratcliff
Wednesday 4th November – Song Three – Twelfth Day
Thursday 5th November – Song Four – The Moonlands
Friday 6th November – Song Five – Hazel Askew
Saturday 7th November – Song 6 and Omnibus
Tickets
Free, or donate to support Ondervinden.
Links
https://www.ondervinden.com/thefolkeffect
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ondervindenUK/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHdYzoVPxe0fJ4sl1vLh8SQ