As part of this year’s Pomegranates Festival from the Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland, Edinburgh’s Scottish Storytelling Centre (SSC) hosted the first dance adaptation of soldier-poet, scholar and folk revivalist Hamish Henderson’s poetry Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (now Libya).The work was his first-hand account from the North African military campaign and considered as some of the finest poetic writing to come out of the Second World War. Viewed as a ‘dance poem’ and a ‘lament for lost lives,’ this performance is a revised version of its inaugural one performed on Remembrance Day 2023.
Before heading down to the auditorium, SSC Director Donald Smith set the scene with a short informal talk to the assembled audience about Henderson, giving the fine summation that he had been “a man of peace who was shaped by war…”
Two soft lit tables are the only props on stage, and it is from here that Henderson’s ten elegies, with their prologue and ending, are delivered. The five barefoot dancers, that include choreographers Helen Gould and George Adams, are Nicola Thomson, Edwin Wen and Aimee Williamson who represent the characters from the ten elegies. While the show is marketed as “…using ceilidh, jive, swing and lindy hop – the popular social dance culture of the 1940s”, in reality these styles are only touched on and stylised within the piece. Predominantly, the style is modern movement depicting situations and at times looking like a full physical signing through the flexible bodies of the dance troupe.
Donald Smith also pointed out the use of the Reel of the 51st Division, a dance created by a soldier in 1940, whose inclusion holds particular Scottish significance to the piece, as its formation denotes the cross of the Saltire. Although this was also done in a stylised version of the original complex moves, it worked for the purposes of the performance. Alongside dance and speech, newly arranged music and song were performed by husky voiced multi-instrumentalist Cera Impala.
First-hand accounts, like the refrain of a woman writing to her darling man and an English version of the unfortunately rather muffled German spoken from the back of the theatre space, and repeated almost in tandem with lovely lucidity by Morag Anderson, are an arresting part of the show.
Although this is a dance show, it is Henderson’s stunning words, delivered by the clear Scots voices of Morag Anderson and Stephen Watt, that are the heft and essence of the show. His dedication of Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica, “for our own and the others”, is typical of a humanitarian with a universal outlook, expressing the stark poignancy of the waste of life on both sides of any conflict when our last moments go to those closest to our hearts and not political leaders.
A post-performance lindy hop social dance session, led and accompanied by Pomegranates 2024 resident musicians from the Castle Rock Jazz Band, was held in the ground floor space at the SSC.
Irene Brown
Radio Summerhall Arts 