“Darling with your anger,
move your body into beat,
I don’t care if you look crazy;
it will help you find your feet.
Darling, don’t be silent,
let your breath move into sound,
I don’t care if you scream;
it will help you hold your ground.
How can we know suffering
with silence with all around?
That’s what music is,
it helps you hold your ground.”
Mairi Campbell sings and step-dances on a bare stage. She plays viola, tells her story in words and conveys it through authentic movement, all as part of her one-woman show, “Pulse.”
Campbell’s performance, which traces the classically-trained musician’s homecoming journey to find her roots and the range of her expressiveness, was described as “a wonderful sequence of movement and sound” when it was first presented at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland in August 2016.
The multitalented Scottish woman’s performance was seen there by members of Northampton’s Serious Play! Theatre Ensemble, who were so taken by it that they arranged to bring “Pulse” to the Shea Theater Friday and Saturday, in what they plan as the first in a series of exchange presentations between Edinburgh and the Pioneer Valley.
“We were blown away by her process,” said Sheryl Stoodley, artistic director and co-founder of Serious Play! about seeing “Pulse” in Edinburgh. “She used everything she’s got to convey her life: animation, classical music, fiddling, clogging, moving, text … She’s amazing. She’s pushed the boundaries everywhere on her own journey, to just tell her story with every ounce of her being.”
The “pulse” is the life force that led Campbell, as a conservatory trained musician constrained by as much as tapping her foot, to travel first to Mexico where she fell in love with a priest, and then to Cape Breton to discover her true cultural identity.
Campbell won as instrumentalist of the year at the 2016 Scots Trad Music Awards and has previously won as Scots Singer of the Year and Tutor of the Year, in addition to receiving the Live Ireland Music Award for Best Female Musician of the Year and for Best Composition of the Year. Her version of Auld Lang Syne was used in the film “Sex and the City.” She runs music retreats on the isle of Lismore and recently returned from touring Denmark with the band Himmerland.
Closer to home, she will be this year’s featured singer in WGBH Radio’s annual Celtic Christmas Sojourn.
Stoodley and her husband, Serious Play! Theatre Ensemble Manager Robin Doty, went to see “Pulse” along with Amherst guitarist John Sheldon, who was presenting his own one-man, autobiographical play “Red Guitar” in Edinburgh.
Stoodley, whom Sheldon has worked with for years, said she helped “shape” his performance piece, which also traces his journey as a performer who felt he wasn’t seen as a whole person.
“At Serious Play!, we always talk about total physical expressiveness on stage. To me, America trains actors from the waist up, but the whole body has to speak when you’re on stage, the whole body has to be present and expressive,” said Stoodley.
Campbell just “had it,” she recalled. “Every sound, every movement, every song, every piece of music she played was total commitment, it wasn’t ever about ‘See me.’”
Doty agreed.
“Is was very refreshing when we saw that piece; just a different kind of journey that’s colored by the personality of that musician-artist-actress that really makes it compelling in terms of putting you at ease, sinking into your soul, looking at your own life and seeing the parallels. Its genuine honesty was refreshingly appealing to us, and the parallels with ‘Red Guitar’ were certainly a plus,” he said. “I find music a very gripping way of getting into people’s souls and getting people’s intention.”
As in “Red Guitar,” which Sheldon plans to return to Edinburgh for a full month next August, “There’s something more here (in ‘Pulse’) than just music, something about how the music happens, and it became theater, a beautiful melding of music and theater,” Doty said.
Serious Play!, which has been around since 1989 and toured its productions of “Milosevic at the Hague” and other plays to Bosnia, Athens, London and Edinburgh, plans to return to the Fringe Festival again, and to choose plays from the festival to bring to the Pioneer Valley as part of a continuing exchange, Stoodley says.
“That’s what we’ve always wanted to do, because … you really need to see your work outside of the (Pioneer) Valley to know if it has legs.” she said. “Those audiences have never seen you, they don’t know you and they aren’t your best friends; they’re looking at the work. I want to be challenged with creating work that’s of the highest artistic value and the best way to communicate with audiences, which is always changing”
She adds, “To me, process is really important: Not just what you show, but how did you get there? What are you trying to provoke in the audience? As artists, we must be constantly growing. That’s why I want to go beyond the (Pioneer) Valley. Politically, it’s a time to reach out to counter Trump pulling in. We need in our cities and our towns to reach out and connect, to build bridges and not walls. In Edinburgh, it’s small enough that if you connect, you can make very meaningful bridges. I want to bring them here, and I’d like to collaborate with international artists, to grow my work and share their points of view, because we think we know it all here. And we don’t.”
To see one of Campbell’s performances, visit: bit.ly/2Bu1Z7L.