The Cairn (2005) 39 minutes

 

By David Butler with music by John Surman

 

Rockjam                      Patrick Goodrich

Lovecage                    Stephanie Guy

Stucker                        Luke Walker

The Professor             David Butler

 

This version of The Cairn is very different from its full form, which first appeared in 2005.  You shouldn’t really be experiencing it like this at all!  The full-length Cairn is 60 minutes and is presented as an immersive installation piece: the audience sit among boulders on a fell-top, eating Kendal mint cake with grass and moss underfoot, surrounded by a curtain of gauze onto which we project the images you are watching here.

 

The original intention was twofold: to find a way of presenting audio drama in a non-radio context (i.e. one in which the attention was focused on the audio and not the reduced listening created by cooking, driving, ironing or whatever as the radio plays in the background) and, more fundamentally, to develop work which challenges the sensory hierarchy of Western culture and its privileging of sight over the other senses, especially the proximity senses.  The full-length Cairn requires the audience to use touch, taste and smell, as well as sight and sound, to fully engage with the experience.  The creation of potent sense-memories is very important to me and much of The Cairn is concerned with memory (some characters are trying to escape their memories, Rockjam wants to surrender to a nostalgic idyll, all of them are haunted in some way by the past). I was keen therefore to give the audience as many means to remember this experience by as possible, even if it was the memory of a soggy bottom on a mossy boulder.  So, I’m afraid that the version you have here is something of a distant impression.

 

Nonetheless, I hope some of that original intention can still be felt.  Not least, I was keen to explore different approaches to the relationship between the imagetrack and the soundtrack.  In The Cairn, the images tend to fulfil the role that music is usually ‘relegated’ to in mainstream film.  I chose images that would set or enhance mood (through colour, movement and rhythm) and operate as visual leitmotifs – there are several of these recurring images (although their colour, rhythm and shading shifts) and I wanted these to operate as visual rhymes.  Slow pans, zooms and long takes were my preferred choices (I can’t deny the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky!) and I wanted several shots to change almost imperceptibly – very much how I experience the felltops.  Often, I’ll gaze at the clouds passing by and not notice them move – look away and look back minutes later and they’ve transformed into entirely different shapes and patterns and we are in a totally different landscape.  I was always encouraged by my mother to see the landscape as being alive and full of possibility – I never understood, when I was little, why she would walk the same paths again and again – ‘it’s never the same path David’ and she was right – the heather might have changed or the raindrops glisten on the slate that hadn’t glistened before.

 

I wanted to give the audience the space to create their own connections between the music, the narrative and the images.  There are several clear points of synchronisation but numerous sequences (moreso in the full-length version) where the audience is given the space and time to identify patterns in the landscape, maybe faces in the rocks, a certain shade of stone, which they might relate to what they are hearing.  Slow cross-dissolves feature extensively and these were used to create the sense of fading memories, ghost images, slipping inexorably away to be replaced by something new – again, qualities I hope that are evocative of the piece’s concern with memory.

The images came second – I filmed in the fells after I had received the wonderful music from John Surman and several dialogue sequences were re-recorded with the actors aware of the music and pitching their performances accordingly (this is especially true of the opening sequence, recorded on location as the two leads, Patrick and Stephanie, climbed Haystacks [in the Buttermere valley, near where I live] and part ad-libbed their ascent with the music in mind [John picked up instinctively on the return to childhood and you can hear his opening piece ‘regress’ into the nursery rhyme Three Blind Mice]).

 

It was a joy to work with John Surman and the piece was written with his music in mind – his combination of ancient and modern, English folksong, modern jazz and electronica seemed ideal to me for the tensions in the play between the past, present and future (plus his regular modus operandi of multi-tracking horn lines was perfect for the notion of the two central characters being in dialogue with each other, unable to leave the other despite their different personalities).  John, of course, is one of the most celebrated of British jazz musicians and has recorded numerous albums for ECM since the 1970s.  He worked closely with his son Ben on the electronics and I was particularly delighted with the Ligeti-inspired drones for the spirit of the cairn itself – when I heard these cues I couldn’t help but think of the Monolith in 2001 and that’s reflected in the visuals.  In the script, I described the ‘voice’ of the cairn as ‘the sound of a thousand Buddhist monks trapped in the belly of the mountain’ and John and Ben gave me exactly what I heard in my head.

 

The images were filmed with the help of Martin Behrman, Will Newell and Stuart Brown in the late summer of 2004 on a variety of fells stretching from Cat Bells to Dale Head and Haystacks.  The actual cairn is the summit cairn on High Spy, which overlooks the Borrowdale valley, and it’s one of the finest cairns I know.

 

The felltop ambience was recorded on location as were the actors, although much had to be redone in the studio due to wind buffeting and the distant throb of jumbo jets at 20,000 feet (who are infuriating to work with and don’t take kindly to direction – they just go off in a huff to Greenland).

 

The actual piece is very much influenced by growing up in Cumbria (but not exclusive to a Cumbrian experience).  Many young people leave the county – are forced to due to the lack of job prospects – but struggle to leave it in their hearts, yet find it difficult to return.  Others again (and this is true of many of my childhood friends) leave and grow bitter toward the region and what they perceive as the county’s refusal to allow them to be the person that they wanted to be.  Some return and find that they contribute to the decay – rural villages wither and die, and transform into the second homes of those who have succeeded elsewhere. 

 

Nostalgia, in the Greek and Russian sense (Tarkovsky looms large again!), compels and terrifies me – the yearning for a lost home and community that can never be attained.  I don’t offer a solution in the piece and I don’t condemn or champion Rockjam or Lovecage – all the characters are flawed in some way and each gets the opportunity to put their case.  The extended version has more characters and some of Rockjam and Lovecage’s emotional journey is lost in this edited form but the core themes are intact I hope.  You may think that the Professor is an odd character (and you’d be right!) but he is based on an actual figure from Lakeland folklore – Millican Dalton, who was known by the locals in Borrowdale as the Professor of Adventure.  In the late 19^th century he gave up his city job and settled in a cave, high up in Borrowdale, teaching the ways of the mountains to those who came to visit him.  He had bright eyes and a remarkable beard.  You can’t make this sort of thing up – but I’d never heard of Millican when I wrote the first draft of the play.  It was only later that I discovered his extraordinary story and I wonder if I’d absorbed a ‘race memory’ of him as a child, or maybe the Professor of Adventure whispered to me through the stones as I rested by the cairn on High Spy.  I hope he speaks to you in the performance tonight.