Dalston Songs

Synopsis

A powerful, funny and touching piece of song theatre, Dalston Songs is a unique blend of music and choreography about memories of home and what ‘home’ means. Performance creator and self-taught composer Helen Chadwick was inspired by the stories and memories of people in her local community in Dalston, East London, where many different cultures co-exist. Stories emerged through interviews with her neighbours and Dalston residents. For some ‘home’ meant life in a new country, escape from a war zone or arrival from a destroyed homeland, for others the tales were more domestic. These stories became the basis for lyrics used alongside powerful texts by Serbian, Argentinean, Palestinian, and Turkish poets.

Our Review:

Simon Thomas - 4 February 2010

Incongruity of setting can sometimes add something to a performance. While La bohème is currently nestling beautifully in a pub in Kilburn High Road, Helen Chadwick’s “A Cappella Song Theatre” piece sits comfortably in the relative opulence of the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio.

While OperaUpClose takes “high art” and pours it onto the streets, Dalston Songs reverses the process and brings the stuff of street, bedsit and kebab shop into the theatre. If there’s something of the cuckoo about the work, it is perfectly at one with the themes of displacement and home discomforts.

Chadwick takes the words of her neighbours in Dalston – a fantastic mix of races where some 79 languages are spoken - and spins them into 70 minutes of unaccompanied song, exploring what home is and, more importantly, what it is not. “Home is a feeling, it’s not a place” intones one resident on the soundtrack, for t...

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Latest User Review

Cassox - 7 February 2010:

When entering the auditorium i thought that this was a community production, but alas it was a full professional show. It is misplaced at the opera house. It should be on at the Arcola, or the young vic. The work feels very early in production, and despite some occasionally interesting movement work the show needs a massive amount of both dramaturgical and directorial work. Running at 1.5 hours, it is far to long and the material far too weak to carry it through. The music has its moments (8 singers and recordings of residents of Dalston) but it feels unbelievably worthy, Like the Opera house had to fund something very bland about ethnic minorities at the expense of something potentially much more interesting. I found the 'Home is where the heart is' moral (if you can call it that) extremely offensive, but would probably delight the over liberalism and PC theatre brigade at city hall (Think about the disaster of the Beijing olympics and the red bus horror show and you get an idea of what Dalston Songs is like).If this is the work that Operagenesis is funding, i despair at operas future....

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