Being ushered to your places through ACCA’s torch-lit side corridors and onto the actual stage is a clear hint that the venue’s opening show for this year’s Brighton Festival sets out to probe a very different world of wonder. ‘Where the Veil is Thin’, a project which sees experimental Celtic musician/composer Brighde Chaimbeul collaborating with movement artists Maëva Berthelot and Temitope Ajose, insists on gathering its audience in the round, intimate, involved and close up. It’s not the usual framing for a performance and neither is the presence of Chaimbeul, Berthelot and Ajose stood spotlit as we enter, gently daubing black body paint on each other from a pristine conch shell, oblivious to the seat-taking going on around them. A ripple of tension circles the audience, peppered with apprehensive chatter before an eerie quiet descends on us tightly packed onlookers.
‘Where the Veil is Thin’ imagines the final dance of Cailleach Bheur, the Queen of Winter in Gaelic mythology, before her demise at the coming of spring. Featuring new music from the award winning Scottish small pipes player Chaimbeul, her first since the ground breaking ‘Carry Them With Us’ album, and visualised through Berthelot and Ajose’s kinetic choreography, the piece was premiered at Somerset House back in March this year. So it’s quite a coup for the Festival to secure another staging of this mysteriously resonant work of experiential art, a retelling of legend that reflects the dynamics of today.
The Cailleach, a one-eyed giantess associated with the creation of harsh landscapes, mountainous peaks and relentless darkness, represents a figure of formidable power but eventual decline, a timeless trajectory that the piece sets out to explore. A veil of gossamer thin sheeting arcing down from the ceiling and curling out onto the stage floor provides a poignant backdrop while the low lights’ piercing crimson beams add to the foreboding. From the outset it’s clear that this is no evening of lightly skipped folk whimsy, the performers bringing a gripping intensity even in their stillness. There’s something deeply hypnotic about throbbing monotone drone that Chaimbeul coaxes from her music station when she first sits, while Berthelot and Ajose lay entwined and motionless on the floor out front. Watching such intricately fashioned minimalism brings your attention to the subtle detail of the dancers’ small movements as they slowly wake from rest, the cupping of hands, the interlocking of toes, the slightest turn of head. It’s an exceptionally well realised calm before the presumption of an epic storm.
The way that the trio sustain such slow motion for an extended time, letting the activity uncoil in front of us, is a credit to their dramatic intuition. While Chaimbeul triggers some sonorous Gaellic verse into the soundscape, Berthelot and Ajose, gradually contort and rise, maintaining a frictionless woven contact as one body. The imagery they develop of Cailleach Bheur, the mighty giantess, one dancer scaling acrobatically onto the other’s shoulders, is one of the defining imprints that the evening leaves.
After this first crescendo the performance pauses and shifts almost surreally for the story’s literal last dance. There’s a costume switch into hiking tops and caps, trekking shoes and socks, Chaimbeul joining in by quirkily perching a hat on head. It’s slightly absurdist, a little unsettling and maybe a reference to the Cailleach Bheur who, as legend has it, strode over the Scottish landscape, shaping its highest peaks.
Whatever the intention nothing detracts from the visceral power of their ongoing combined sounds and movement. Chaimbeul lets the multi-toned patterns from her pipes flourish, whirling up a giddy, other-worldly reel that Berthelot and Ajose take up with relish. The pair dance apart, often mirroring each other, at one point seeming to mimic a gallop or maybe not (the shapes shift so rapidly as we watch). Then at other times they each take an improvisational free flow route, meeting Chaimbeul’s blissfully whirling stomp with yelps of boundless joy.
The wind-down comes illusively, a natural conclusion that sees the pipe melody slow with Berthelot and Ajose supine, arms and legs in the air. The scene could be tinged with comedy but here as Chaimbeul sings a gorgeous air with a sombre clarity, the gravitas hangs heavy over the stage. To add impact, she disconnects her pipes from her sound set up, takes up the yearning melody on the unplugged instrument and paces slowly towards the prone dancers. Rising up Berthelot and Ajose fall gracefully in line behind their piper and the three leave the stage in procession to this most haunting lament. As Chaimbeul’s notes disappear into a natural silence the audience seems to take a collective breath.
After the event, pin sharp memories and drifting thoughts still linger of a performance that was exquisitely measured but vibrantly real and which did more than re-tell an ancient story. Touching ambitiously during its swift forty-minute passage on themes of time and cycles, dominance, survival and our place in nature, ‘Where the Veil is Thin’ reaches beyond being a stunning audio-visual expression. It creates a space to tangle with some of the most fundamental questions.
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The Attenborough Centre For Creative Arts, Sunday 5th May 2024
Words by John Parry
Photos by Victor Frankowski
