SINGING BONES REVIEWS

Erica Wagner The Times Literary Supplement
October 16 2010 12:01AM
if you had your ear pressed to the door you would have thought that whoever was on stage was doing stand-up comedy
Just occasionally, if you’re lucky, there are moments in life when it all comes together. You know what I mean — when the ideas you have, the sense you possess of the way that things ought to be, somehow, seem vindicated. Not because you’re proved “right” in any particular way — I put that word in quotation marks to serve as a kind of punctuatory quarantine — but because the world around you seems to chime, ring true.
I’ve had one of those weeks, I’m glad to say. It started last Saturday when I sat on stage at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham with Sir Salman Rushdie. If you’re at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival this weekend, you’ll see that I’m doing quite a few events, but Sir Salman’s was my first this year; there’s always the question of getting into the groove, and I was a little nervous. I needn’t have been. Maybe you’ve got the idea that Rushdie’s a terribly serious chap, but if you had been outside the theatre with your ear pressed to the door you would have thought that whoever was on stage was doing stand-up comedy. Rushdie and I, and the audience — armed with plenty of good questions — weren’t being frivolous, however: there was an aspect of laughter in the dark as Rushdie joked about his time in hiding after The Satanic Verses, which, he acknowledged, wasn’t funny at the time.
He was a bit more serious in answering a question regarding the definition of his work as “magical realism”. He distanced himself, to a certain degree, from the term, pointing out that it is more correctly applied to South American novelists such as Gabriel García Márquez. But all this came in the context of a discussion of his latest book, Luka and the Fire of Life, which was written for his 13-year-old son, Milan, and follows the path of its predecessor, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by telling a fantastical, and yet entirely emotionally believable, tale about a storyteller and his son. And as Rushdie writes, “Man is the Storytelling Animal ... stories are his identity, his meaning and his lifeblood. Do rats tell tales? Do porpoises have narrative purposes? Do elephants elephantasise? You know as well as I do that they do not. Man alone burns with books.”
Before books there were stories — no point in making too much of a fuss about the difference between the two if we are considering the tales, like Rushdie’s, which dare to cross the boundary between this world and the other world. The most magical tales are often the ones that allow us to see our world most clearly — and I found myself thinking of Rushdie as I sat in the Barbican Pit a couple of nights ago, listening to The Singing Bones performed by The Devil’s Violin. The Devil’s Violin are fiddler Oliver Wilson-Dickson, cellist Sarah Moody, accordionist Luke Carver Goss and storyteller Daniel Morden.
The Singing Bones is an enchantment, a work that walks the line between life and death, between what we are and what we might become; which recognises with the power of voice and the power of music, that there is magic everywhere. Rushdie knows that too; all great artists do. Art itself is magic; that’s all there is to it. If you can’t be in Cheltenham this weekend I’ll be sorry to miss you, but then, perhaps, you might catch The Devil’s Violin on tour.
cheltenhamfestivals.com, 0844 5768970; www.thedevilsviolin.co.uk

The Singing Bones - Chapter Arts Centre Cardiff
Posted by Adele Thomas on March 31, 2010 at 9:35pm

Just walked out of Chapter after having watched the most beautiful show, The Singing Bones by the fabulous and immensely, consummately skilled company The Devil's Violin. It's been such a long time since I have seen a show that moved me like that and in an age where the lists of creatives credited in programmes seems to be getting longer as standard, to see 4 people making an expertly crafted piece of theatre with nothing but their talent was breathtaking and hugely refreshing. It's on tour and worth seeing http://www.thedevilsviolin.co.uk/

North Wall Arts Centre, 6 Oct 2009
By and large, and in the strictest sense, people don’t tell stories these days. They may write them, or act them out, or sing them, or preach them but stories are rarely just plain told. It’s almost unsettling then, at first, to have just one man stand on a stage and tell you a story. It’s not immediately the most engaging of storytelling methods, even with some brilliantly atmospheric backing music. However, if you can work through your natural discomfort for such things, you become drawn into a world where the characters and action become every bit as real as if they were all up on that stage with the teller of tales.
The Singing Bones, performed by the Devil’s Violin, is two things: a performance by a wonderful folk band and an involving story told to music. The music has shades of the Gallic, the Gaelic and even Scandinavian, all written by the band, with a fiddle, a cello and an accordion. The story is about, well, stories, and centres on one orphan who is told dark tales to teach him about death, secrets and love. Stories, though, need to be told, so when he refuses to pass them on, and instead just repeats them into a bag, the stories become rather angry.
What starts off slowly, like the Brothers Grimm meets the soundtrack to a Stella Artois advert, becomes far more involving. The music and the story itself become more intense, taking the audience through all the emotions. The story about love is particularly well told and the high point of The Singing Bones, where the words and the music compliment each other perfectly, so that you forget that the narrator is not, in fact, a married couple but one man, in a flowery shirt. The Devil’s Violin are touring with The Singing Bones for the rest of the year and it is highly recommended that you catch it while you can.
Rhys Griffiths, 07/10/09

DEVIL'S VIOLIN REVIEWS

“A scintillating combination of music, sound and story” The Times

"If you've ever been less than taken with storytelling, put the experience to one side and be prepared to be amazed, transported and moved by this masterful exemplar of the genre." Venue

"Here's one show that lives up to it's name." The Big Issue

"Fabulous blend of words and music, just wonderful!" Jude Merrill, Director of Travelling
Light Theatre

Full reviews:

'Daniel Morden's impelling, theatrical storytelling is by turns visceral, eerie and heart-wrenching,underpinned and heightened by virtuoso gypsy riffs which take the audience by the hand and lead them, sometimes jigging and sauntering, sometimes at a breakneck rush or a stealthy creep, through the dark, shape-shifting woods of Romany folk law. Using just his own 'bag 'o bones' and
his voice, which has a range of mood and tone as wide the instruments that accompany him, Morden
unearths and celebrates a rich oral tradition which has been buried for too long. If you've ever
been less than taken with storytelling, put the experience to one side and be prepared to be
amazed, transported and moved by this masterful exemplar of the genre.' VENUE (Bristol)

The Devil’s Violin – a review by Professor Mike Wilson, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries,
University of Glamorgan

'The Devil’s Violin is a new touring show performed by Daniel Morden and a group of musicians consisting of Oliver Wilson-Dickson (violin), Eddy Jay (accordion) and Sarah Moody (cello). Having seen the show at Theatr Y Bont, Pontypridd on 27 September, it is my opinion that this show represents a significant step forward in the development of storytelling as a performance art.
Over the past ten years or so, storytelling has begun to develop its range both in terms of applied practice and performance forms. This has led to the emergence of an increasing number of shows, constructed around specific themes or collections of stories and that have been increasingly formal or theatrical in their approach and often involved a number of different storytellers. This has been a development from the model of the storytelling ‘concert’ that was prevalent in the eighties and early nineties where storytellers would generally work in an individual capacity from a flexible repertoire. Daniel Morden has been a key player in these developments of storytelling for adult audiences. It could, however, be argued that this highly performative (and, indeed, rehearsed) approach to storytelling runs counter to the more democratic (and, therefore, informal) nature of storytelling itself. My own view is that different occasions demand different kinds of storytelling and the highly performative approach has been a legitimate, and largely successful attempt to allow storytelling to reside in the more formal venues of theatres and arts centres. The danger is that in the formalisation of the storytelling experience, some storytellers will aspire to entering the ritualised and shamanistic realm of storytelling, adopting the role of ‘storyteller-aspriest’ and yet fall short of it. What makes The Devil’s Violin such an extraordinary piece of work is that it pulls back from such a position. As a piece of storytelling, this is probably the most formal, stylised and scripted work I have seen from Daniel Morden and that is, in part, out of necessity from working with a group of musicians. The concert format is abandoned in favour of a more coherent show which place the individual stories and items of music into a frame that holds everything together into a single experience and that is one element that makes this a significant development in storytelling. But it is Morden’s control over his performance and his playfulness with the form that is most impressive.
After the show a colleague remarked to me that it was very useful for students to see such an effective, yet simple performance. What she was referring to was the effectiveness of a performance that was uncluttered by set, props, costume, technology and, even, characterisation. It was simply a group of performers telling a story with words and music. Nevertheless, I would contend that that it is a simplicity that masks a much greater complexity and an effortlessness that conceals a sophisticated level of virtuosity and artistry amongst all the performers. Morden’s skill is that he formalises the performance right up to the point of entering the realm of ritual and the shamanistic. He takes us right up to the wire and then, with a light gesture or glance at the audience, he draws back from the edge, reminding us that we are simply watching a storyteller telling us a story. It shocks us out of our enchantment , rather than allowing us to wallow in it and, in so doing, forces us to take a fresh, critical look at the story. In Brechtian terms, this is a perfect piece of Verfremdung and it what makes watching The Devil’s Violin a truly epic experience.'