Botswana artists on Commonwealth Games song

| Monday July 28, 2014 12:03

 Involving more than 150 artists from Scotland, New Zealand, Botswana, India, South Africa and a few other countries, Anamchara (Gaelic for ‘soul friends’) is a song cycle — a friendship oratorio — that explores the ties that bind us, rather than the demons that drive us to tears and worse, says Calgarian Col Cseke, the producer. “This is a very optimistic opera,” says Cseke on a Skype call from Glasgow.

The project, part of the cultural component of the Commonwealth Games, has its world première July 25 in Glasgow, which is where Cseke has been holed up for the past month, working as an artistic associate. He’s there working alongside Calgary Opera Emerging Artist alumni Jennifer Sproule and Ben Covey, who are performing the seven song cycle alongside other singers and dancers from around the globe, including The No. 1 Ladies Opera House in Botswana, South Africa’s Cape Town Opera, Australia’s Queensland Opera, the New Zealand Opera, Scottish Opera and India’s Yuva Ekta Foundation.

The show also includes a full orchestra, children’s choir, and community chorus that was cast from a contingent of Glasgow newcomers who hail from a dozen different countries, according to Cseke.

Throw in 30 to 40 members of a backstage production team, and the total number of people involved with the production comes close to 150.

Anamchara explores what friendship means to people from all over the planet, explained composer Pippa Murphy, who created the music (with lyrics by novelist Alexander McCall Smith), to the Herald during a visit the creative team took to Calgary in 2013.

“Everyone experiences it,” she says, “so it’s a case of looking at how everyone experiences different (friendship) rituals, how rituals work in different cultures, how you greet people, what kinds of different clapping children’s games there are — all that sort of stuff.”

That tour including a movie crew, which toured Calgary elementary schools, asking Calgary schoolchildren to talk about the theme of friendship.

What they discovered, as they travelled from Alberta to the other Commonwealth countries participating in the project, was that friendship here looks and sounds a lot like friendship everywhere.

“When you get down to discussing that notion of friendship,” says Lissa Lorenzo, the Scottish Opera’s Emerging Artists Director who’s co-directing Anamchara, “fundamentally people come back with the same sorts of responses.”

For Cseke, who works with the Calgary Opera teaching in schools in addition to his work as the co-artistic director of Verb Theatre and Inside Out Theatre, which works with people of mixed abilities, Anamchara has presented him with a chance to put the community-building skills he practises in Calgary’s arts community to use on a global scale.(Mail Online)