Stan's Cafe: We Know That Music Is Music.
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Unlimited set the brief to create a piece of theatre in response to a favourite musical track.
The assumption was that the piece would be performed to the track. Unable to imagine a satisfying
relationship between the music and theatre in this scenario the invitation was initially declined.
Speculating as to what track would have been used if the piece were to be been made, thoughts kept
returning to Primal Scream's Come Together as featured on their album Screamadelica. This track,
running at a little over ten minutes, is essentially an anthemic groove with faux gospel refrain
and a heavy sampling of the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
A bit of research tracked the samples to a speech given at the opening of Wattstax, a black
music festival staged at the Los Angeles coliseum in 1972. A trawl of YouTube allowed the
speech to be seen as it appears in Wattstax, the 1973 film documenting the festival. In
its full form the speech is a powerful invocation of black pride, in its sampled form
racial politics has been stripped away and it has become a celebration of musicÕs power
to bring people together (hence, potentially, the track's title). Shocked by this rewriting
the commission an approach was made to Unlimited and the commission accepted.
The Stan's Cafe version of Come Together withdraws the music from the audience. Instead
Graeme as some kind of either politician or preacher or even record executive delivers
Rev Jackson's text live as it appears on the Primal Scream track, mostly from behind a
table but ultimately standing at the front edge of the stage. Lucy delivers the female
vocal line "All Together, As One". This again synchronises with its appearance on the
track but spoken not sung. She appears to be an acolyte of Graeme's, sat behind and to
Graeme's right. Craig, possibly a bodyguard, sat behind Graeme but to his left, embodies
the rest of the track. He taps the high hat pattern out on his knee and other musical
lines are translated into physical equivalents. At the close of the piece, when the
performance of the track is finished, the Rev Jackson is heard over the P.A. a sample
from the speech, not heard on the record, which makes clear the racial context of
the original.
The performance was very tense, highly charged, restrained, quite still and for
long periods silent. Craig wore an ear piece through which he listened to the original
track played very quietly, allowing him to keep time. The curious device of performing
live a thing that has been sampled forced a new interpretation on the material, similar
to the 'sampling' of phrase book text in Be Proud Of Me.
The texts performance by white
actors was deliberate and provocative. The recent victory of Barack Obama in the US
presidential election gave the piece an extra resonance.
Devised and Improvised by:
Graeme Rose, Lucy Nicholls and Craig Stephens
Direction: James Yarker
Commissioned by Unlimited Theatre for their
Mixtape project Come Together was performed as part
of Pilot Night, an evening of performance fragments and works in progress by a number of different
companies at The Custard Factory in Birmingham
