writing the libretto

By Poppy

It's a curious experience writing a libretto for an opera - made even curiouser when one is working from the transcripts of real life interviews. I did a similar thing on our production Waiting in 2010 working from the verbatim text of British Muslim women whose husbands had been detained in Guantanamo and Belmarsh. But on that project the text already existed and I didn't meet the women until the piece was performed, which allowed me a certain distance from the material and possibly greater artistic licence. With Flicker - an opera about giving a voice to those unable to communicate - I feel so keenly the responsibility to do justice to the voices of the many patients and staff that we've interviewed - to try and preserve the idiosyncrasies of their speech patterns, to retain the accuracy of the science and also throughout all of that to carve out a narrative that hangs together and resonates, with characters who each have a consistent voice (although the truth is that each character comes from several interviews and partly from my imagination).

Hopefully I won't give Jon too much of a head-ache giving him phrases like 'We can use neuro-imaging equipment to show auditory evoked potentials' to set to music! But I think my role really is about finding the poetry in the every day - there are phrases and snatches of text that I'm weaving into the libretto that have come from the very beginning of the process - back in the autumn of 2011 when we first met with Sophie Duport, our scientific advisor she spoke very eloquently about the inability to express emotion when you are Locked In 'how do I [they] cry, the cry cannot come', and even a phrase from a meeting with our Wellcome trust grant manager 'suffer with less suffering' has made it in. Ultimately I have to write something that Jon can set and the performers can sing so I'm always drawn back to short phrases and repetition, although sometimes there's no avoiding the technical jargon for the scientist character - but I think those sections will have a more recitative-y feeling out of necessity. Also I hope to inject some levity into the piece - the last thing we want is 60 minutes of misery - with a few choice swear words. There's nothing like an opera singer singing the word 'fucking' to lighten the mood.

Metta likes connection...

Metta likes connection...

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The more observant among you may have noticed that we haven't blogged for a while...or in fact at all this year! Ooops. We shall use the at least partially valid excuse that we've been quite busy having a baby. But as well as having a baby we have also been busy (perhaps too busy) making some theatre. Our two major projects this year are a new opera about Locked In Syndrome (a condition where the body is cut off from the brain leaving the patient fully aware and in tact cognitively but physically entirely paralysed) called Flicker, and a collection of 6 short plays responding to the events of the Arab uprisings, within the framework of the Arabian Nights, called (somewhat unimaginatively perhaps) Arab Nights.

On the face of it the two projects couldn't be more different, but this week I have been struck by how they speak to each-other in terms of connection. The opera - for which I am writing the libretto - is being based on the verbatim transcripts of interviews with patients and staff at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability and after months of meetings with the staff, last week Jon Nicholls (the composer) and I finally met with some of the patients. Some of them are completely Locked In (and can only blink their eyes to communicate - as in the book and film 'The Diving Bell and The Butterfly') and others partially locked in with some degree of movement in their hands - such that they are able to use assistive communication aides, most commonly a light-writer which allows them to type sentences that are sometimes then translated into speech by the same computer. But as you can imagine this is an incredibly long and tiring process for them, and it can take up to half an hour for them to communicate one sentence. But perhaps the most striking thing about these interviews, aside from the patients' somewhat surprising optimism about their condition and situation, is how hard they were prepared to work to make a connection and communicate something to us. And relatedly how a large part of this act of connection and communication is (although helped a lot by the technology) actually still hugely non-verbal and conveyed through their eyes and through touch.

Meanwhile I have been making connections - again with the help of technology, albeit the simpler form of email - with the writers of Arab Nights who come from Egypt Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine & Syria and who mostly still reside in these countries. It's an amazing thing to have forged relationships with these writers - some of whom I may well never actually meet in the flesh, or 'in the real' as one of the writers so poetically put it. And yet through email, Facebook, Twitter we share stories, pictures of our children, the minutiae that make up a life. As well as transcending borders, and languages, to create these plays together it feels like we're also making very human connections that I hope will continue long after the production itself is over.

And between the meetings and the emails and the connecting with people on the other side of the world and with people locked inside their own private worlds we also fumble towards the connections you try to make with a tiny person - who now four and a half months old is desperate to make his own connection to the world and everyone in it.

Arab Nights - Raja's week

Arab Nights - Raja's week

So we open our latest production - Arab Nights - six weeks today at the Soho Theatre in London (crikey - that's soon!) - and to celebrate the six diverse and wonderful voices that make up the play they are each going to write a little something for the Metta blog. First - the wonderful novelist and all round lovely human being that is our Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh...

Just back to Palestine after a seven week absence in the UK promoting my new book, Occupation Diaries. Slight feeling of let down after the exciting time going from one literary festival to another. As expected found the garden in a dismal state, with only the shrubs barely surviving the heat and dryness of a hot Palestinian summer.

But before plunging into work on the garden, at my law office and on my various writing projects, had to take my wife to Makassed Hospital, a Palestinian hospital in East Jerusalem, to check on her arm which was broken during a hiking trip to Skye last July. Heard from the Orthopedic Doctor about the difficulties the hospital faces because of the closure of Jerusalem.

Fortunately I don’t need to go often to Jerusalem. But most of the hundreds of the hospital’s employees, doctors, trainees and patients come from the Palestinian areas around Jerusalem and must get a permit from the Israeli military to get to work, to train or get medical treatment at this specialized, training hospital which has better facilities than any in the rest of the West Bank. They have to endure the daily ordeal of crossing the checkpoints around the eastern, mainly Arab part of the city. I cannot imagine how they endure this ordeal twice every day of their working week. In Arab Nights I wrote how Jerusalem now has not one but two walls. Within the older Ottoman-built wall today (Friday October 5th) there were confrontations between extremist religious Jews and Palestinians inthe precinct of the Al Aqsa Mosque.

Every day no less than 20,000 Palestinians cross one of the gates in the concrete wall newly constructed by the Israeli government around the expanded area of Jerusalem. They do so in silence, a heavy silence at that. Except, that is, for the orders they hear from the Israeli soldiers whom they do not see, just as though they were invisible Djinnis.

It was only natural then that when Metta Theatre proposed that I participate in writing a play that uses the style ofArabian Nights I found this the perfect style for presenting the surrealistic reality under which we live in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

We in Palestine are part of the rest of the Arab region. The revolutions taking place around us give us hope. It is this hope makes it possible to endure what appears for the time being to be a desperate situation, here. As the Palestinian character in Arab Nights endures his ordeal before the wall he remembers the scaling by Palestinians and Syrians of another border, a few months earlier, during the Arab Spring, when they crossed the Syrian- Israeli border daring to traverse what was thought to be a minefield.

It sounds like magic and in some ways it was. And yet it happened. One episode in the play leads to another, just like in our turbulent life in this unstable region. From despair to hope, to dreams, to frustration just like the life here that I returned to after my few weeks in the UK.

Raja Shehadeh | Friday October 5th 2012

Patient interviews

By Poppy

This week we have been interviewing patients for the opera. It’s been an incredible process and a real eye-opener for us both. When we started this project I think we both had a fairly narrow view of Locked In Syndrome - largely from reading about it in ‘The Diving Bell and The Butterfly’ which is probably a way in to the condition for a lot of people. But actually what we explore in the opera is a much broader spectrum of high cognition, low mobility states. So we met with a range of patients - some who had retained eye movement only and others who had over time developed flickers of movements in their hands and arms - such that they could operate switches and light-writers (a kind of keyboard) to communicate. For all of the patients being able to communicate was hugely important - and one patient when asked to describe how it felt now that her communication system was in place said beautifully ‘feeling less forgotten’ - a phrase that will definitely appear within the libretto. But although important to them it is nevertheless hugely fatiguing - no interview was more than an hour long and by 45 minutes in each patient was visibly finding it harder to communicate simply through fatigue. Many of them had lots to say about their interests - in West Ham Football Club, in R&B music - but for some the act of communicating a sentence of even a short phrase could take up to half an hour as we would often have to go letter by letter, and in several instances where the technology was playing up, or was simply too much effort by that point in the interview they reverted to much more low-tech methods of communication including writing each letter in the air - for one patient who had movement in his hand, or mouthing each letter. But as you can imagine if you’re not a highly skilled speech therapist (which I’m not) it’s easy to mistake a ‘p’ for a ‘t’ so the process was often even longer due to our misinterpretations. Nonetheless the patients were so keen to share their experiences with us and so positive about their conditions. It’s very easy to presume that such a life - which undeniably is full of challenges both physical and emotional - would be a depressing existence but what struck Jon and I is how positive and optimistic all the patients we met with were - no doubt in large part to the incredible support, care and resources they have access to at the RHN. That place is such an inspiration.

Psychology

by Poppy

Today I met with Sal Connelly head of Psychology at the RHN to talk about her work with the patients of LIS, and their families. I was flying solo as Jon wasn’t around so the interview had a chattier tone than usual, but luckily Sal is a wonderfully chatty woman. Of course I still gathered reams of useful material, as it was very focused chat, some of which has already begun to form the basis of an aria for the opera. My mind was particularly blown by a comment Sal made about identity – namely that we tend to define ourselves by what we do, and our activities and roles. For example, if someone asked me who I was, I might start by saying I was a director, a mother etc, i.e. defining myself by my roles. Whereas if a child is asked to define their parent they will do so using emotional language I.e. my mum is nice, she makes me feel happy etc. So an initial hurdle for locked in patients adjusting to their new state is this reimagining of identity when they can no longer perform the roles by which they previously defined themselves. It seems obvious, in a way but redefining ourselves, or our notion of ourselves, not by what we do but by how we are can be an extremely empowering tool (arguably for everyone, not only LIS patients). More generally the interview provided a great insight into the process of adjustment for locked in patients and their internal experience, though admittedly from a somewhat outside eye. The next stage then is to hear it from the patients themselves, which we will hopefully begin doing in the next few weeks...

 

Moving Forwards

By JN. Very excited with how far we've now come with the project; it only seems like yesterday that Poppy and I were sitting in a cafe on the Portobello Road batting the original idea to and fro and wondering how on earth we could get something like this off the ground. Now we've got hours of interviews with truly remarkable people to sift through, have a venue pencilled in for the end of January 2013, are putting our team of musicians and singers together and starting to sense a structure, narrative and musical ideas starting to emerge. We're even (more or less) on schedule...

Compass

by Jon

Great visit today with Poppy, Will (and Noah!) to the hospital's COMPASS centre, where the tireless staff constantly develop and refine the amazing hi (and often lo)-tech technological solutions enabling patients to communicate and interact. We were welcomed and shown round by team member Marc Viera, who gave us a whistle-stop tour of the various communication devices used by patients, ranging from the EyeGaze system which allows the user to control a computer cursor using just eye movements (which as Poppy discovered is much harder than it looks...) to a whole range of ingenious devices controlled by different kinds of switches and triggers. One of the most fascinating aspects of the COMPASS team's work is how the smallest flicker of physical capacity on the part of an individual patient can be exploited to create a completely personalised / bespoke communication / facilitation system. The journey towards communication is becoming a key part of the libretto, so I'm sure we'll be back for a repeat visit some time soon...