root salad
Fire In The North Sky An English storyteller and Finnish musicians are
bring the Kalevala to the UK, hears Chris Nickson. 19 f
and Wayland the Smith with their grandeur and gore, have their origins else- where. But in Finland, a place which only became an independent nation in 1917, the Kalevala story stands as a powerful symbol of identity, even though its mix of stories and poetry wasn’t published until 1835, collected and collated in the Karelia region by Elias Lönnrot. And now the Kalevala is coming to Britain in Fire In The North Sky: Epic Tales From Finland, a new collabora- tion between and English storyteller and Finnish musicians.
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“Doing something like this has been in the back of my mind for ten years,” explains the storyteller (and musician) Nick Hennessey. “There’s an epic singing tradition in Finland, the runosong, but there’s not really much sto- rytelling. I began talking to the others about the idea of performing it like this, but it’s taken a long time to reach this stage.”
Those others are flautist Kristiina Ilmo- nen, singer Anna-Kaisa Lides, and kantele/ pyngyr player Timo Väänänen, who also perform together as Suunta.
“We’d worked with Nick on other things,” Ilmonen says. “He has a real affinity for Finland, and the Kalevala is familiar to us, of course. There’s a strong folk tradition behind it. But this idea brings a completely new perspective to it all.”
The performances aren’t an attempt to tell the whole story – it’s far too long for that – but to illuminate it and bring out the ideas from sections.
“It’s been a huge challenge,” Hen- nessey says. “There are about 50 runosongs in the Kalevala, and singers would put dif- ferent ones together to form constellations, which would change from performance to performance. We used that concept. But only a small part has been translated into English, so I also used songs we translated.”
One challenge for Hennessey was using the English language to convey something so quintessentially Finnish, and to come up with rules for this type of performance, the first of its kind.
“None of the sung words are in English,” he points out. “They’re in the orig- inal language. English doesn’t fit with the Karelian. Anna-Kaisa might sing a version of a song and I’ll tell a story, but there’s always that vital relationship between the English and the Finnish. It’s storytelling meets per- formance art in a way.”
Hennessey’s own relationship with the
Kalevala goes back a long way. In 2000 he won the world championship in epic singing in Espoo and he’s performed it in English in Finland on a number of occasions since, as well as appearing on radio discussing the relationship between the Kalevala and Finnish identity. But working with others like this is more than a culmination of his learning. It’s forced him to rethink much of what he’s learned.
“I’ve had to learn to improvise in metre,” he notes, “and to work in episodes from the tale, figuring out how the English telling will be different and bringing in other sounds and ideas. I have to respond to the musicians, just as they do to me.”
The long relationship and trust between the artists and the long work that’s gone into making the idea of per- forming the Kalevala a reality, also gives them freedom to improvise, building from a sentence, a riff played by the musicians, even interacting with the audience.
“Response and improvisation is very much part of this,” Hennessey observes. “If a moment strikes a spark we have to be ready and willing to roll with it, to develop moments in the whole and feel free enough to explore them.”
“It’s inspiring,” says Ilmonen. “It’s us in
the now, the performance is never locked. And our Finnish story becomes drama more than poetry.”
he performers are all engaged for every minute on the stage, alert and intent, building and bouncing off each other in work they began at the start of 2014 in intensive rehearsal sessions both in Finland and England that culminated in performances at National Kalevala Day in Finland and the Beyond The Borders storytelling festival in Wales.
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There may be a recording of Fire In The North Sky: Epic Tales From Finland but if it happens, it will be live. Because the essence of it all is storytelling, a form where impro- visation around a theme is so vital, Hen- nessey has found himself completely immersed in the telling.
“It’s stayed with me, completely taken me over for a while after every performance so I didn’t know whether I was here or in Finland, or even what time I was in. I’ll be in a strange place when we start touring.”
That seven-date tour in October promises to be the start of things for the project.
“I think we’ll tour with it in Finland, too,” Ilmonen says. “It’s a fresh look into our own history. Even for Finnish-speaking audiences it should be interesting.”
And perhaps it can start young Finns – and young Brits – thinking anew about the power of stories.
www.adversecamber.org/productions/ fire-in-the-north-sky
F
very country should have an epic tale. In England, the closest things are the Arthurian legends and the Robin Hood stories; both Beowulf
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