f50 Dress Rehearsal
Rowan Rheingans has been road-testing an intriguing new one-woman show, Dispatches On The Red Dress. Ian Anderson cornered her to find out more.
V
enues don’t come much small- er and more perfectly formed than the tiny theatre above the Alma Tavern in Clifton. It’s a shame that demands on it
for thespian activities don’t allow it to be used more often for music, for it is an acoustic artist’s micro-paradise, with bare- ly 50 tightly banked seats and near-per- fect acoustics. But by some miracle of cos- mic matchmaking, Rowan Rheingans had secured it on a Sunday afternoon in Octo- ber for a work-in-progress road test of her one-woman show Dispatches On The Red Dress, and all the elements combined to produce a mesmerising gig that had me thinking for days.
You’d imagine that Rowan doesn’t have a lot of time on her hands for more creative projects, what with the Rheingans Sisters (check back on Tim Chipping’s cover feature on fR394), Lady Maisery, Coven, Songs Of Separation, Gwyneth Glyn’s band and her all-women Duane Eddy covers band, the Red-Headed Twangers. (OK, I made that last one up, more in hope than expectation!) That’s the way the folk scene works now, compared with earlier days when there were more clubs and venues to support an individual working year- round. Artists nowadays are forced to do specific tours, which then allows them to work in different units. Half the people on the scene seem to be playing in at least two or three different line-ups.
“Yeah, it’s true. And there are positives and negatives to that. For me, the variety is really interesting, and it’s very important that each project I’m doing serves a differ- ent part of me. Lady Maisery and the Rheingans Sisters, which are my main tour- ing acts, they both give me something very different, which are equally important. And then touring with someone like Gwyneth allows me to be almost like a ses- sion musician, really supporting someone else’s music, which is a whole different skill, and it’s very relaxing for me: it’s all about her music and I’m just giving my skill, and that’s lovely. I’m not talking, I’m not taking any real responsibility for how things come across, I’m just providing what she needs for those songs, and that’s nice. But it’s always a balance: when I’m doing too
much of that stuff I find I’ve lost my own creative thing, and then if I’m doing too much when everyone is looking at me all the time it’s also not so healthy. And when I go to Sweden in the summers, playing for dancing is what I love to do because it’s a whole different way of performing – you can see people are enjoying it, people are dancing, the focus is totally different.”
But the solo show is something she was clearly burning to do, not just because it allows her to unveil a shiny new black Gretsch electric jazz guitar. Her blurb describes the show as something which “circles around me and my grandmother, as we talk across time and space. It is an experimental song cycle which is all about the power and peace-making potential of telling different kinds of stories…” And what I mustn’t do is tell you what the story is, because the reveal is important to the show. It would be as big a spoiler as giving away the secret of The Mousetrap.
Anybody who has seen the Rheingans Sisters’ magical gigs will know that it’s never been just some wonderful songs and tunes, skilfully and originally played and sung. I’ve been at Sisters gigs with people who aren’t ‘folkies’, and after- show comments have been about how engaging they are between songs – sto- ries of their unconventional lives and the backgrounds to their music intrigue and draw people in. It’s not unlike the Coppers Family’s audiences going away secretly wishing they could be adopted. Rowan seems to be a ‘natural’.
“Well, it’s interesting that you say that,” she says. “Over the last few years I’ve realised how much I enjoy those bits, because a lot of the magic for us in our gigs is the linking together of music and songs, even if it’s not explicit links – like how do we weave something that runs through the gig. And I’ve found myself really relish- ing those bits. I don’t think of myself as a storyteller, and when I watch people doing that I’m very intimidated and amazed by it. Still, I am accepting the role more.”
A large part of Dispatches On The Red
Dress emanates from stories that were told in their family. Do those Rheingans have a storytelling gene?
work-in-progress shows, was ‘I wish my grandparents had talked to me.’ And that’s been really gratifying for me, and makes me appreciate how lucky I have been to have had that wealth of stories. But it’s also bittersweet to have those stories in your life.”
“I
So how did the notion of the show arise? “Good question. Very slowly, really slowly, over probably the last four or five years, and from different angles. It’s only been relatively recently that things have sped up and formed a whole, so that I can see what it actually is. I think I’ve had an idea for a while that I wanted to do a solo thing, a show or performance or project, because of what you just said – that I’m in a lot of bands. It’s just a curiosity really, what happens when I’m on my own and what happens when I allow myself to write music that is not specifically with a band in mind or with an aim in mind even. I actually began a lot of the writing for this before I really knew what it was.”
You’ve said that the songs fixed the narrative, but they weren’t written for it.
“Yes, absolutely. The general ball park
of the show, the emotional landscape of it, the political colour of it and the general theme of it has been around for quite a few years, and I knew it was something about that, so I had been writing with that in mind and reading a lot and going quite deep into some of the ideas. I did a course in Edinburgh which was a creative, artistic, breaking apart and putting together of yourself, and it had quite a wide view of it all while I was writing the material. And then the story that forms the centre of the show has always been the crux of the whole thing, but I wasn’t sure until quite recently that I would actually just tell that story. Then I went on this big journey, thinking about all the different metaphors and jumping-off points that could come out of that story, and then actually coming back to it, the story that forms the back- bone of it.”
think there is, in a very nat- ural way that I imagine exists in a lot of families. What a lot of people have said to me after seeing the
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