For dancer Alex Elliott, the impulse to sing is what led her to the genesis point of her latest piece.
“It was sort of a task I had set for myself when I was going to Iceland for a residency called SIM,” she explained in an interview on Morning Light. “Before going, I had this idea that I wanted to be using my voice, and so I thought, ‘Well, what if I found an ancient or an Icelandic lullaby and perhaps, you know, found someone who would be interested in teaching it to me.’”
Before long, Elliott found a lullaby called “Sofðu unga ástin min” - “Sleep, my young love” - and under the mentorship of artists in Reykjavik, she began to develop the piece that would become Let’s not stay awake through dark nights, which opens this week at the Théâtre Cercle Molière in St. Boniface.
Even while she was in Iceland, Elliott was planning collaborations with Winnipeg artists like designer Brenda McLean. “She contacted me via email and she said, ‘Oh, I have this piece I'm working on and I want to take it to the Fringe and would you be interested in coming on board and collaborating with me and here's this lullaby that we're using,’” McLean recalls. “It brought connotations of this kind of deep, methodic kind of world to the piece. And I think it was very inspiring.”
Let’s not stay awake through dark nights is not the first piece of theatre that “Sofðu unga ástin min” has inspired. An Icelandic play by Johan Sigurd Jonsson from the early 20th century also includes the lullaby, and the story of the play – based on the true story of two outlaws – also informs Elliott and McLean’s work, which in turn takes on an eerie, dark nature.
McLean notes that it is the essence of the lullaby and the play that lends itself to the production of Let’s not stay awake through dark nights. “Theatre is very narrative,” she explains, “but in dance, you can pull out symbolism or imagery or themes and highlight them in a design context.”
Elliott and McLean will not be the only artists responding to the source material for Let’s not stay awake through dark nights. Two-spirit Metis-Cree artist Victoria Perrie was also invited by Théâtre Cercle Molière to create her own artistic response which audiences will also have a chance to engage with.
“She’ll be connecting to Brenda’s set design as well as the lullaby in her own way,” says Elliott. “I feel so grateful that she has this offer, she has this idea.”
Let’s not stay awake through dark nights runs from June 11 to 15 at Théâtre Cercle Molière. Tickets are available on a pay-what-you-can basis and are available through Elliott’s website.
