Rachel Jones, Hey Maudie

at St James’s Piccadilly

21 September 2023
00:00
00:00

In September 2023, we presented Hey, Maudie, a new performance commission by Rachel Jones which draws on the operatic form alongside poetry and wide-ranging music and oral traditions.

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Hey, Maudie inaugurates our Practising Performance programme, which provides artists with unique opportunities to expand their work through performance. With our support, Jones developed the performance over a year-long period that involved conversation, workshops and improvisation.

Following an initial phase of R&D, Jones invited poet Victoria Adukwei Bulley and composer Joseph Howard to collaborate on her concept for a live, opera-based work.

Reflecting a collage of perspectives, the libretto, co-authored by Jones and Adukwei Bulley, takes inspiration from Gwendolyn Brooks' 1953 novel, Maud Martha.

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Brooks’ Maud Martha, which remained unpublished in Britain until 2022, traces the life of a young Black woman in 1940s and 50s America through a series of lyrical vignettes, employing a unique third-person interior voice.

Across four acts, Hey, Maudie follows the character of Maud Martha (sung by soprano Gweneth Ann Rand), as she converses with a choral ensemble that represents her soul and another intimate, interior voice, spoken by Jones.

The performance's structure also references the compositional technique of call-and-response, a musical and cultural tradition with West African roots, which became an intrinsic way for Black women to express themselves individually and collectively.

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Hey, Maudie demonstrates the radical potential of interdisciplinary commissioning, combining literature, poetry, music and fashion within a visual arts context. For Jones, the ability to take an instinctive approach was essential to the production, which centres relationality and collaboration and brings in the voices and perspectives of her collaborators.

Writing the libretto began with conversations between Jones and Victoria Adukwei Bulley about Brooks’ Maud Martha, which they also discussed together with US-based academic and writer, Kevin Quashie. Through a process of co-writing and editing, Jones and Adukwei Bulley established Maud Martha’s rich inner life, exploring Black interiority and rest through Martha’s sensibility and approach to the world.

Joseph Howard’s expansive score, developed through conversations with Jones and a series of workshops, draws on various classical traditions, gospel and jazz elements as well as spoken word to express a complex, embodied sound that evokes the moments of joy and desire, curiosity and wonder, frustration and dejection that punctuate Maud Martha’s life.

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Jones invited ROKSANDA to provide the costumes for the opera, inspired by the designer’s subtle approach to material, structure and shape. Responsive to the ideas central to the opera, the costumes focus attention on the grace and gravity, playfulness and sensuality of Maud Martha’s character. Jones was drawn to how ROKSANDA uses material, structure and shape to invite us to look closely at details and express character and movement.

Hey, Maudie came together in the seventeenth-century surroundings of St James’s Piccadilly across two performances on 21 September 2023. The church, renowned for its inclusive approach, diverse community and activism, became a fitting context for Maud Martha’s introspective musings and her quest for solace and care.

Roberts Institute of Art
Roberts Institute of Art
Roberts Institute of Art

Creative Director/Co-author: Rachel Jones

Rachel Jones is an artist working in painting, installation, sound and performance. Jones explores a sense of self as a visual, visceral experience. In her paintings, she grapples with the challenges of finding visual means to convey abstract, existential concepts. In depicting the psychological truths of being and the emotions these engender, abstraction becomes a way of expressing the intangible. The artist repeats motifs and symbols across her series to create associative, even familial, relationships between them, underscoring their kinship as part of her ongoing investigation of identity. Her expressive use of colour becomes a way of provoking or communicating with viewers, who bring their own lived experiences and cultural backgrounds to the interpretation of her works. This sense of community and shared history comes to the fore in her installations and performances, in which imagery, sound and music coalesce in a celebration of Black culture.

Photo by Eva Herzog

Roberts Institute of Art

Co-author: Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a British-born Ghanaian poet, writer, and filmmaker who was shortlisted for the Brunel University African Poetry Prize in 2016 and received an Eric Gregory Award for her pamphlet Girl B, published as part of the New Generation African Poets series in 2017. An alumna of both the Barbican Young Poets and Octavia Poetry Collectives, as well as a Complete Works and Instituto Sacatar fellow, Bulley has held residencies internationally in the US, Brazil, and the UK. In 2019, she was awarded a TECHNĒ scholarship for fully-funded doctoral research at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her critically acclaimed debut poetry collection, QUIET, won the Rathbones Folio Prize for Poetry, the John Pollard International Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. QUIET is published by Faber & Faber in the UK and in North America by Knopf, Penguin Random House.

Bulley is also the director of MOTHER TONGUES, an intergenerational poetry, film and translation project exploring the indigenous linguistic heritages of poets of colour, supported by Autograph and Arts Council England.

Photo by Derrick T. Kakembo

Roberts Institute of Art

Composer: Joseph Howard

Joseph Howard is a composer working in the UK. He writes for acoustic instruments, electronics, and for film and theatre.

Recently he has completed commissions for the Carducci Quartet, Jess Gillam Ensemble, Andrew Watts (countertenor) and Gavin Roberts (piano), among others. He was the 2013 winner of the National Centre for Early Music’s Young Composers Competition for his piece Move! and the 2018 winner of the Moonlight String Orchestra Competition with Helsinki Dances.

Joseph enjoys composing music for all forms of drama. 2022 saw the premieres of the short opera, Behind God’s Back, at the Tête à Tête Opera Festival, as well as a Community Song Cycle, Seven Mercies, at the Ryedale Festival, both with librettist Emma Harding. He also produced the soundtrack for a new BBC Radio 3 production of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus which was recorded by the Society for Strange & Ancient Instruments.

Joseph was Junior Composer-in-Association (2022) at the Purcell School for Young Musicians, Music Fellow (2018) at Rambert Dance Company, and Manson Fellow of Composition (2016) at the Royal Academy of Music.

Originally from Pickering, North Yorkshire, he is now based in London.

Photo by William Marsey

Roberts Institute of Art

Soprano: Gweneth Ann Rand

Gweneth Ann Rand studied at the University of Exeter, Goldsmith’s College and the GSMD. She was a Vilar Young Artist at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and represented England at Cardiff Singer of the World. She is currently an Associate Artist at Wigmore Hall. Recent highlights include acclaimed performances of 4.48 Psychosis for The Royal Opera/Lyric Hammersmith, Prototype Festival – New York, Opéra national du Rhin and Philharmonie de Paris; Rooker Giant at the Aldeburgh Festival;

Tiger Lily Peter Pan, the dark side at the Teatro Comunale di Bolzano; and Serena Porgy and Bess, Mother Bailey It’s a Wonderful Life, Chief Hen/Innkeeper’s Wife The Cunning Little Vixen for English National Opera. Other roles include Aida, Senta, La Gioconda, La Wally, Santuzza and Tosca. She is also noted as an exponent of the works of Messiaen, in particular his song cycles Harawi and Poèmes pour mi.

Photo by Christa Holka

Roberts Institute of Art

Costumes: ROKSANDA

Originally from Serbia, Roksanda Ilincic studied Architecture and Applied Arts at the University of Belgrade before moving to London to complete an MA in Womenswear at Central Saint Martins.

In over a decade since founding her label, Roksanda has evolved an unmistakable design aesthetic as a women consciously designing for women. Roksanda's daring use of colour, unabashed femininity, sculptural shapes, modern distinctive cuts, innovative use of fabrics and unerring attention to detail make up what are now pillars of the ROKSANDA DNA. Synonymous with modern and contemporary art influences, Roksanda regularly collaborates with like-minded female artists and arts institutions internationally.

Roksanda has received multiple awards and nominations for her work including Red Carpet Designer of the Year at the Fashion Awards. She is listed in the Business of Fashion 500, a global index of the most important people shaping the fashion industry today.

ROKSANDA was founded with a view to creating a new perception of femininity, while also being a platform that champions, celebrates and highlights other female voices.

Photo by Quentin Jones

Roberts Institute of Art

Credits

Film by A Little Look Into

All photos by Anne Tetzlaff. © Anne Tetzlaff.

RIA Commission: Practising Performance
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Roberts Institute of Art

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Roberts Institute of Art

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Roberts Institute of Art

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Roberts Institute of Art