Flicker - Research

Here are links to some of the research that helped us develop the opera.

Locked-in syndrome: a review of 139 cases

Pressure Volume Curves of the Respiratory System

Scientists seek to help Locked In man speak

Life can be worth living in locked-in syndrome

We also read the following books which provided a great (non-scientific background)

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean Dominique-Bauby - the book that inspired FLICKER in the first place - beautifully written and powerful memoir about the experiences of having Locked In Syndrome written entirely by Jean blinking his left eyelid.

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes - a surprisingly un-sentimental novel about the relationship between a young man who becomes paraplegic after a motorbike accident and his carer.

opening night

By Poppy

Last night we opened Flicker to an almost sold-out house in the Lilian Baylis Studio of Sadler's Wells. Despite a madly busy day - whose idea was it to have only a day in the space with a huge amount of sound, lighting and video to tech (over 100 video cues in a 55 minute opera) - it was a resounding success. Everyone from funders, to the patients & staff who have contributed to the project and even the random audience members with no connection to the production or to Metta all loved it and found it simultaneously a huge insight into Locked In Syndrome and the work of the RHN and also a profoundly moving and emotionally engaging performance.

So Will was possibly the most stressed of all of us with his several hundred cues and a somewhat recalcitrant set of computers to work from, however everything came together smoothly - if last-minutedly and everyone commented on how beautiful and powerful the video was and how much it added to the performance.

Both Jon and I were slightly shell shocked and I think it will take a few days to process fully how it all went - a surreal experience to have just three days rehearsal and end up presenting something so polished (not quite the concert performance we had originally imagined back in 2011). But we couldn't have wished for a better showcase for the work - the singers were extraordinary, the band under the masterful conducting of Andrew Gourlay were sublime and the actor - our good friend and god mother to our son Noah - Loren O'Dair was astonishing in her portrayal of the Locked In character Iris - communicating so much literally just with the movement of her eyes.

Rehearsals

By Jon

We've been rehearsing 'Flicker' for a couple of days with the full orchestra, the singers, conductor Andrew Gourlay. The RHN have allowed us to rehearse at the hospital, in their wonderful Assembly Room; the patients and staff have been dropping in out of the rehearsals all week, and it feels as if our work's become a real feature of life here, if only for a while – it's lovely to hear the singers' voices echoing down the long Victorian corridors.

After a small crisis occasioned by the delivery of an F-sharp crotale rather than an F-natural one, it's thrilling to hear the piece come to life with such terrific performers. Everyone's working extremely hard, from Andrew's meticulous work on the score, to Will's marshalling of his small army of laptops as he develops the video projections, to Loren's beautifully controlled performance as the 'real' Iris, while Poppy zooms on and off the stage giving directing notes whenever Andrew stops the musicians. The hospital have incredibly generously lent us a bed and wheelchair, which they've custom-fitted with a light-writer for us, which makes a huge difference to the realism of what we're presenting.

I'm still making a few final changes to the score (now I've heard it played live), but really just minor adjustments to the orchestration; overall I'm very pleased with how it's sounding, and as always am overwhelmed by the privilege of having my music played by wonderful musicians. I think we're all feeling quite confident about the performance at Sadler's Wells now, and we're really looking forward to putting the piece in front of a live audience – tomorrow!

Finishing/not finishing

By Jon

I've finished! Or at least that's what I've been going round telling everyone; in fact I've just finished setting the vocal lines and the harmonies, having in the process pushed Poppy's near saint-like patience almost to the limit with my repeated texts and emails asking if we can shave yet another couple of syllables off a line.

I've now got to orchestrate the opera for our five-piece band, and have got about 4 weeks to do it before I have to send the completed score to our conductor Andrew Gourlay, the vocal part to the singers and the instrumental parts to Aurora.

I've made a chart on my studio wall with the total number of bars in the opera (1341), and the number of days left before the deadline, and I've worked out I need to orchestrate at least 123 bars a day to keep on top of things. So far I'm just about managing to do it, thanks in no small part to my assistant Fran, who's input all my manuscript material into Sibelius (a software notation programme), which has saved me a huge amount of time. Once I've (eventually) finished that and sent the score to Andrew, I'll need to go through it again, this time reducing the instrumental version to a keyboard and voice arrangement that we can work with in rehearsal with Aurora's fantastic repetiteur John Reid for a couple of days before the other musicians arrive.

Very excited now the performance at Sadler's Wells has been confirmed, and very much looking forward to hearing it played live by such fantastic musicians.

Baghdad - Late 1970s

Baghdad. Late 1970s. I would come back from my primary school, eat lunch and have a siesta before waking up to watch cartoons. This was my daily routine as a six year old. I still remember that upon waking up I had to wear socks before turning the TV on. For some reason I couldn’t bear the idea of watching cartoons without socks on. Maybe I thought the cartoon characters could see me and they would disapprove of my naked feet.

Most of the cartoons were Japanese imports dubbed into Arabic. The cartoon that stands out in my memory is the adventures of Sindbad. Unlike the Sindbad of the one thousand and one nights, the cartoon version was a young boy with some kind of bird pet for company. There was one particular episode that I found equally fascinating and frightening. It was the episode where Sindbad meets an old man that asks to climb on his back so he may cross a river. However once the old man has his legs wrapped firmly around Sindbad’s neck he refuses to descend and Sindbad has to carry him everywhere. The old man metamorphoses into a scary looking goat. Eventually Sindbad gets the old man-slash-goat to drink some wine and by making him drunk, he gets rid of him.

When I was approached by director Poppy Burton- Morgan to select a story from the one thousand and one nights and use it to write something about the Arab Spring, I knew immediately that I wanted to use the story of Sindbad and the old goat. I read the original version and was surprised how violent and weird it was. In my version, Sindbad is a young man who flees his country in search of a job. He boards a boat that he hopes would smuggle him into Italy. But the boat is caught in a storm and Sindbad is shipwrecked and that’s when he meets a radical preacher that has been exiled by the tyrant that rules Sindbad’s country. This meeting has terrifying consequences for Sindbad.

Young, secular Arabs were the fuel behind the revolutions that swept through Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. However on the back of their success, Islamists parties have come to power. This is largely down to the fact that as opposition figures, the Islamist parties were the most organised and connected to the masses. There is a prevalent belief that Islam is the answer to the woes of the Arab world. The big question now is whether the Arab spring is going to turn into an Islamists winter.
It is certainly possible that these new governments might enforce regressive laws particularly in relation to women’s rights. However, that is not the only possible outcome. When I was researching my play the Prophet (which was shown at the gate theatre during the summer), I interviewed a member of the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood in Cairo who was keen to emphasise the modern face of his organisation. Provided the Islamists parties do not go down the road of rigging elections
then their influence on the political scene might wain as secular parties find their feet in this post dictatorial era.

Sindbad and the old goat is a cautionary tale about the Arab Spring. And so we could all hope that it would never come true.

Hassan Abdulrazzak | Monday November 26th 2012

Arab Nights - Chirine's Letter

Just one week now until Arab Nights opens at the Soho in London - and this week it's the turn of Egyptian storyteller Chirine El Ansary to share her thoughts... This is an open letter to the respectable Egyptian citizen, a father, a mother, an aunt, an uncle... Those who carefully brought us up, with much love indeed.
Those who responsibly scolded us for lying, while meticulously teaching us never to be true to ourselves, explaining over and over again that 'who we truly were' was not acceptable and that in order to become decent members of this decent society we had to be shaped and reshaped, moulded and remoulded to fit in.

The respectable Egyptian citizen, a father, a mother, an aunt, an uncle,
who filled with fear and a destructive-protective instinct, desperately tried convincing us that there was no "way out" or rather that the only "way out" was in fact a "way in" based on permanent denial and everlasting compromise. Denial and compromise until Death comes in.
Not physical Death, but the insidious Death of the soul, the heart, the will...
Whatever you want to call "it".
"It" that makes us unique individuals and keeps us alive.

A few managed to resist.
They made difficult choices and had to bear the consequences : pointed fingers, loneliness, alienation, harassment, accusations of having betrayed their own society, of not being real Egyptians, of being influenced or manipulated. In the mean time, many others, too exhausted to offer more resistance, gave in.
They turned into puppets, reluctantly leading a life in which decisions and choices strengthened a rotten, corrupt system profiting a handful of worthless criminals.
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil...and rot...and die.

Kan yama kan,
Once upon a time
There was this lovely very young woman
There was this lovely very young man
She was learned in poetry, music, philosophy, mathematics, computing,
He was learned in poetry, music, philosophy, mathematics, computing,
She spoke several languages,
He spoke several languages,
She was and idealist,
He was an idealist,
The One Thousand and One Stories they knew made them want to speak the truth, Become freedom fighters.
They would save their country and change the World!
They were both Shahrazad.
Yes, he was Shahrazad too,
For is it possible to sacrifice a woman without sacrificing a man?

Kan yama kan
Once upon a time
There were all these older experienced good Egyptian citizens
Who knew Wrong from Right
Who knew Evil from Good
Who knew Ugliness from Beauty
They had a strong sense of Morality and had to protect it, no matter what,
Even If it meant the collapse of Integrity and Humanity
Even if it meant turning the hope-filled roads into dead-ends.

Conservatism, Fundamentalism, Wahabism, Salafism, Bla-bla-ism,
So many isms that we like to accuse.
But what about the sweet respectable citizens, who carry no "isms" but nevertheless twisted the truth and accepted the unacceptable?

They who for decades turned a blind eye and a deaf ear on the horrors that were taking place, condemning the few who dared speak,
thus making possible the inconceivable, Snipers
Thugs
Expired tear gas
Cold blooded murders for Security's sake
Street children turned kid soldiers
Officially approved rapes
Virginity tests they had somehow been silently conducting for years.

Chirine El Ansary | Wednesday November 14th 2012

Arab Nights - Ghalia's Thoughts

Just two weeks now until Arab Nights opens at the Soho in London - and so this week I'm sharing Syrian author and Journalist Ghalia Kabbani's moving thoughts and musings on her contribution to the production...

Ghalia Kabbani | Friday November 9th 2012

How can I express what is happening in Syria through 'One Thousand and One Nights'? This was the question which jumped to my mind after a call from the director Poppy Burton-Morgan to contribute to her play which reflects the atmosphere of the Arab Spring.

Once I started thinking of the proposal, I imagined Scheherazade trapped throughout those years inside the stories, threatening her with death night after night. Does my country Syria not live with this fear daily? Hasn’t every Syrian who lives in Syria been ready to be arrested, tortured and killed at any moment, for decades?

Who says that Scheherazade is destined to continue telling the stories striving to find the time to save herself from her executer? Who says that Syria and the Syrians have to continue to show their false loyalty and live in fear of a hypocritical system, under the influence of a tyrant while the world around them is embracing freedom and democracy?

I am going to write about Syria to free Scheherazade from that historic burden of being a ransom for other women, and so she is going to be my symbol for Syria, who also has to offer her duties as the continuation of loyalty.

Freeing Scheherazade from this daily fear is the symbol of my play. I had to recall all of the metaphors which I had read or heard, and have entered our popular vocabulary, such as when we call a woman who is showing off ‘sitt elhosn' - the lady of beauty” and we use Shahrayar as symbol of control, and the example of  “brave Hassan” to describe a young man who lets no obstacle stand in his way. And let us not forget the stories of the Djinnis and the tales in the palaces (including those of maids and slaves), and whatever else can fill the imagination.

All these are expressions we use in our conversation and proverbs without being aware of their reference back to these tales. Even expressions of love and sex, they are stored in the collective memory, and people believe that they are their own, unaware that they belong to these tales.

Scheherazade and Syria share more than one element in common. There is the oppression and fear and the children Scheherazade bears while she is telling her stories for year after year. With every child she conceives, she suffers, as her child could lose her at any moment. Her children grow up watching their mother living in fear of the daily possibility of death, as every day she searches her imagination for a new tale. So why doesn’t the time come for the turn of her children to free their mother and face up to the tyranny of their father Shahrayar?

Is this not what the children of Syria, in Daraa city, who were arrested did? Some of them were sent back as disfigured corpses to their parents - like Hamza Al Khateeb - whose parents received his corpse with his genitalia removed. “He was trying to rape women!” That was the official reason for killing him. A thirteen year old child was accused of rape because he and his friends wrote on his school wall: “people want to bring down the regime.”

They were only children. Children who were aware of the modern technology of satellites, internet, smart phones, instant news, scandalous photos and the stream of information reaching people despite the control of the regime. Those children watched the Tunisian President Ben Ali and President Mubarak of Egypt falling from power. Since the people there gathered in squares seeking the freedom denied to them for decades, the children of Syria asked: why are our parents suffering quietly from fear every day, and why do they whisper their views? Why don’t they express them loudly? But more importantly - why are they asking their children to do the same thing, teaching them hypocrisy in life! Children brought up to hide their true opinions, repeating at school the slogan that supports the Baath Party, saluting the president’s life ‘He is our leader forever'. After images from Tunisia and Egypt revolutions flooded the country, children of Daraa asked: why does Syria not have a Tahrir Square, a place for revolution?

Perhaps if it was not for the children in Daara and what happened to them, a revolution would not have erupted to ruffle the waters which have remained stagnant for half a century.

To express all of this, I did not want to use one of Scheherazade’s existing stories as a theme, instead I decided to create my own using the style of “the nights”, a story generated from another, with the help of my recollection of tales added to by new thoughts on the current situation in Syria.

I imagine a female writer, Rana, who lives inside the country and wants to work with a group of children to produce a work inspired by “the nights”, she contacts Ayman, her friend who lives in the Diaspora, asking him to provide her with an electronic copy of “the nights” because her Internet is slow and it is not easy to access it through her PC. but Ayman can’t find a valid copy of the stories. So Rana, working from memory and folklore, starts to create her first story about Scheherazade which leads to a story of “Lady of Damascus”, the daughter of a Brocade cloth maker: (a fabric well-known for hundreds of years exported from Syria and worn by the royal families in Europe).

As Jasmine is the symbol of Damascus it occurred to me to have it as the signature of the 'Lady of Damascus' embroidered upon the cloth, just as Brocade is the symbol of the authenticity of Syria’s history.

When the 'Lady of Damascus' is accused of killing her children, it is the unique weaving of brocade, which she has taught her children that saves her. She recognises the shroud she asks for while waiting for her death, is weaved and signed the same way she taught her children, so they prove her innocence years after the Queen of Djinnis has abducted them.

Back to Scheherazade as we see her in the play - bearing three children who grow up while she tells her stories. I thought that it is time for an end to this daily threat of death. The children have grown up with her anxiety every night. So they face their father Shahrayar with their decision: it is their turn now to tell their own stories, they are the new narrators, and they will carry their mother’s burden. It is time for Scheherazade to sleep undisturbed.