Words from the Producer - Ann Donnelly
In 2021-22, Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive invited creative practitioners to respond to With Heart and Hand, a UTV programme made in 1966 to commemorate the Battle of the Somme. For the programme, UTV recorded interviews with veterans who recalled their experiences in that famous battle, and throughout WW1. The footage also captures poignant stories from the home front during that time.
In Lark, Choreographer Jennifer Rooney focussed on a story told by an unnamed, wounded soldier, who spoke of a lark that found itself caught up in the middle of the battle. Taking this fragile songbird as a metaphor for resilience, and weaving the veteran’s voice into the piece, the choreographer has made a tender and powerful Dance for Camera, working with dancer, Maeve McGreevy, Co-director Tom Hughes, and Sound Designer Garth Mc Conaghie. The dancer’s body moves in the present-day landscape, disrupted by those seismic and pervasive ripples of global conflict that continue to reverberate down the years.
Works such as Lark and the artworks made by Seacourt Print Workshop artists, bring new interpretations to narratives around WW1. This particular Dance for Camera work brings a female perspective on conflict, helping to open up the stories to new audiences, and adding a rich new layer to the With Heart and Hand collection.
Words from the Choreographer/Co-Director - Jennifer Rooney
Lark is based on the telling of a story of a simple moment of wonder amongst utter devastation and destruction. We used the words spoken by the serviceman and responded using movement and film to try and capture the emotion of the human connection to nature.
The dancer embodies the spirit of the Lark as it flies in the face of danger, twisted and deformed in the shockwave of the blast from the bombs, yet in her fragility she recovers to rise above chaos. As the battles took place in the fields of Europe on the grass and soil with the vast sky as a background, so does she begin and end connected to the earth. We did not want to shy away from the truth of the devastation and chose to pay homage to those who died by recreating images of their final resting position. We explored the stark truth of war when some parts of life survive whilst others are defeated.
Words from the Co-Director and Editor - Tom Hughes
Having worked with dancer Maeve McGreevy on a number of projects, I was delighted to collaborate with Jennifer Rooney as a co-director on the film Lark. At the stage I joined, Jen had devised much of the movement with Maeve - my role was to begin to translate the movement to screen, building a film that allowed the choreography, narrative, and most importantly, the archive material to blend together.
A distinctive movement that had been devised were the haunting shapes of the dead in the trenches – a visceral reminder of the inhumanity (and humanity) in WWI. Sitting separate to the main choreographic flow, it was a critical element that needed a sensitive perspective for it to be resolved into the film. Out of that process became for me the most impactful part – using classic compositing techniques to allow Maeve to contort into the fallen forms, leaving the traces behind to form a sculptural memorial to the dead.
Words from the dancer - Maeve McGreevy
As a dancer, it is rare to come upon a project that truly affects you emotionally, intellectually and physically. This is what Lark did and continues to do for me.
“…a piece where I need you to be a bird” – I did not know the entire context to begin with but when Jen dropped this into conversation in a warehouse studio after rehearsals for a separate work, I was instantly intrigued and, essentially, committed. Who would not want to know the feeling of flight? Of lightness? Of absolute awareness of environment? When research progressed and I realised the weight of these sensations in relation to the WWI veterans and their recollections – specifically the story of one lone, hopeful bird - I now fully recognised the privilege of being invited into the world of what became Lark.
To place such a fragile memory as that of the lark rising and singing sweetly in the aftermath of a catastrophic bombing, into the frame of a dance film was a delicate task. Physically, the playing with perspective of bird-body vs. human-body in contrasting movement and stillness is where I felt most honestly tied to the lark, our speaker, and those who had been silenced in his story. Lying and crawling in the muck in that County Down field on a fresh St.Patrick’s Day is a memory that will stay with me. The tiniest of glimpses into what those men in the trenches may have seen and felt at ground level, near death, with the prospect of some form of relief, even beauty, in the sky above.
Words from the Composer and Sound Designer - Garth McConaghie
As with the movement direction and visuals, everything in this film revolves around an (as of yet unidentified) sound recording, from 1966. There’s something extremely visceral about older recording equipment capturing the first-hand memories of camaraderies and seismic trauma, that we can barely comprehend.
For the music, I combine unresolving cellos and basses (earthy, vibrating strings resonating in and transmitting from wood) with bellows; all sonically far below high, emerging atonal woodwinds, hopefully reflective of birdsong.
The sound design tries to connect sinew, tissue and bone, to earth, grass and air. Deep and abstract ‘metallic’ sounds juxtapose all of this, yet communicate, in dissonance, with the deeper resonances of earth.
Ultimately, I attempt not to make anything too emotionally assertive but, rather, honour the visuals by interpreting the sonic vibrations of our environment, in all its microtonal universality.