Katie Noonan has performed in many guises. Whether it is with her jazz ensemble of Elixir, collaborating with the Australian Symphony Orchestra, or recording albums with her mother Maggie. She’s made her next step in a fascinating career by coordinating Love-Song-Circus, a piece of cross art forms that envelops Australian history, circus performance and song cycles. The show has had very successful runs in Brisbane, Adelaide and Melbourne already and is set to wow eyes in Sydney in the next few days.
Philippe Perez chatted to Katie about the research and many other aspects of the performance.
There are so many stories behind many facets of the performance of Love-Song-Circus. What made you want to undertake such a complex and ambitious project?
Basically, the whole thing was inspired by an exhibition at the National Museum called Love Token. It’s actually the largest collection of convict coins in the world. These coins were inscribed with messages that the convicts would leave for their families, husbands and partners that they’d leave behind. Sometimes the families would leave messages for the convicts too, and they’d be hung around their neck.
The words were so beautiful and poetic and full of love and longing. I wanted to learn more about these people. I do have convict history [in my heritage], not that it was a personal story, I was just trying to find more about the people that formed the background of the non-indigenous history of Australia.
As a woman and a mother, I wanted to find out about the women’s story [of that era]. The women’s story has largely been untold, and that made the journey a little difficult in my research.
What type of research did you undertake?
Initially the project evolved because of challenges along the way, but my initial concept was to find the love letters of these women and set them to song. Essentially [I wanted to] bring to life their loss and their love and their luck and their longing and all this kind of stuff. I then discovered that literacy was a gift generally bestowed upon men and not on women, and if it were, it would be bestowed upon women of nobility of which very few were convicts.
So that idea was quickly thwarted because finding the actual letters were difficult. The [act of] letter writing then was more filled with the details of being far away from home, this new foreign land and the difficult journey to come here. [There weren’t] many letters that dealt with affairs of the heart as such.
I moved away from that and then started on a journey of research reading reports and a whole heap of thesis and books about this time. All of these are listed on my latest album (Fierce Hearts) if you want to continue to research yourself. I started finding about all these amazing women and wrote a series of songs for them but actually as if I was them, in the first person.
That’s quite a lot of work to put into an album as opposed to getting a bunch of chords and melodies together for a bunch of songs. How unique is this process to you?
I’ve never done anything like this before. Aside from all the extensive reading and research, I also went on various field trips to the places where these women were incarcerated. One of the main ones I headed to was the Cascade Female Factory just outside of Hobart. I also went down to Port Arthur, not that any women had been there, but to get a sense of the convict experience. It obviously has some very awful modern history implications as well, but it is so isolated and you can imagine how this place must have felt in Australia’s early years.
I could only imagine what it would be like being in this new place at that time. It could have been another planet – the land, animals, weather were all very different. Everything – the topography, the plants would have been nothing like home. I just wanted to get that sense of how far away they felt.
They travelled 16,000 miles over many months on a boat filled with incredible disease. For the women especially, there was a whole load of sexual and general abuse towards them. It was a barbaric and intense time when I discovered it.
Were you a history buff when you were younger?
To be honest I’ve never been a history buff at all in school. It never really interested me.
It was just something about the poetic nature of these convict love tokens that spoke to me as an artist from an inspirational point of view. It began a very interesting long journey into finding out about these women and discovering stoic, strong, kick-arse type of women. I absolutely salute, respect and feel honoured to be telling their story.
Could you tell one of the stories that resonated with yourself while doing your research?
The women that resonated most with me I put into song, and I called all the songs by their name. There was firstly Esther Johnson, and also Janet, Jane, Louisa, Ellen and lastly there is Mary Reibey.
Mary was maybe probably the most famous of them. She is on our $20 note. Again – I didn’t have an idea who she was. It was just a face on our Australian tender to me, but after the research, I found out she came from nothing. She came from a children’s orphanage, one of the boys in the orphanage died and she stole his clothes so she could flee. She also stole a horse to escape and was eventually found in the next town and charged tried. She was sentenced to death and she was fourteen at the time. Unfathomable to think about that when she was a child.
Somehow her sentence got reduced to fourteen years of deportation to Van Dieman’s land and on the boat she disguised herself as a boy to protect herself from the abuse [that I mentioned before]. I suppose because she was so young she hadn’t fully developed as a woman. Luckily with her she was of certain nobility and had some education, so she didn’t get out to the factory to work the hard labour that many other women where undertaking for fourteen hours a day.
She was still incarcerated though, but went on to fall in love with a man called Thomas Reibey and they ended up having an incredible life together. They had seven children and became widowed after Thomas was killed. She went on to become a fierce businesswoman and helped to start the Bank of New South Wales. She also helped started the Sydney Grammer School and was [one of the pioneers] of how to trade with Asia, and one of the first Australians to do so.
She became a tycoon eventually, having multiple businesses while being a widowed mother to seven children. She died what was considered a wealthy woman at the time. She also owned the whole suburb of Annandale and would drive herself in a horse drawn carriage dressed in black and stuff. She sounded like a totally fascinating, amazing, strong woman back then.
Why do we as a society not know about these stories? I can’t remember being taught these stories when I was school or through my life.
We really don’t know anything about females of Australia. That’s just a reflection of the time [that I was researching]. Obviously women weren’t granted the same respect and rights as men.
But Australia is, was, has been and will also be one of the leading countries for female women’s rights. We were one of the first countries to allow women the vote, we were one of the first countries for women to own their own land, and allow women to open a bank account. Not that I can prove this, but I feel that those achievements have certainly been aided by these incredible women in our settled history. They were so tough
You know The Rocks? The whole entire area was actually run by women. A lot of the publicans were women, they were amazingly smart and to survive, they had to be very, very strong. These women were Australia’s first feminists in a practical sense, really.
I noticed that Love-Song-Circus has an educational element and performance for high schools. Could you tell me more about that?
Yeah, we made an e-kit that anyone can download for free. It’s designed for high school students, but surely any musician or any person interested in history or music can check it out. It was through Musica Viva, and there is quite deep analysis of three of the pieces. There are various exercises and stuff too.
Is parlaying knowledge and education through the art form of music something that you want to do more of?
Yeah I’ve done a bit of that in the past for Musica Viva as well who are the peak educational body for music in Australia. I just thought “wow, I would really loved to find about these stories when I was a young girl.” Maybe they might read about it more and further that knowledge as well to our future generations.
It may also spark their creativity or inspire them to do something else. I don’t know, possibilities are endless!
I think education is something I’m passionate about, there is an importance of education within music and vice versa, especially within young minds.
You’ve painted a type of ‘musical portrait’ of a part of Australia’s history with this work. Other bands have done similar things as well. One of those bands that come to mind is Midnight Oil who, to me, portrays Australian history in their songs in their own special way. Do you think more bands or musicians other than yourself should paint a portrait of Australia’s history in today’s music industry?
I would hope so. Otherwise it’d be depressing if music lost that power. Midnight Oil is one of the most powerful bands in our history in being able to tell stories of this country. I loved seeing them live and had the honour of touring with them quite a bit. (Katie’s first band) george had the honour of touring with them for their 20,000 Watt RSL album.
Obviously their ability to teach [history] resonated with me. I didn’t know who Truganini was, and kind of found out through their song [of the same name]. The power of information that they sent to millions of different people is huge. It also brought Australia’s woeful treatment of indigenous people to the forefront of the Australian public’s mind.
I certainly think there hasn’t been a band like that since they’ve been around. I hope there can be a band like that in the future.
I must say I am a little disillusioned with what is currently called pop music nowadays. I can’t listen to commercial music at all. Even what I used to listen to… obviously the more triple j and the like change, the more I change. It’s harder for me to connect with the music they play and it could be just that I’m older and it’s not really a station designed for [my demographic].
Their demographic is very clear. It’s a tween type of station… [they aim for] an actual age thing I reckon. I don’t know… let’s just say I wish today music could be saying a bit more. Let’s put it that way.
Online videos of Love-Song-Circus show an interesting way that you organise the ‘song cycle’, as you describe it, combined with the circus performers on stage with you. Why did you decide to incorporate them within this performance particularly?
Well, to me, when I think of an image of strong women in current theatre, I think of circus, physical theatre and acrobatic artists. They display a great discipline and a great strength. They’re not presenting or representing the story in a literal sense. It’s not like they are actors and they’re [acting out the stories]. They are embodying the spirit of these women through various little shapes that they create.
Most of the themes of the show revolve around the idea of sisterhood, solidarity and strength. I thought that women manifesting that in a physical sense would be a beautiful addition to the piece. I also wanted the piece to be a visual and aural feast, so that not only you have a seven-piece band there, but also you can physically and visually experience these wonderful shapes made by these beautiful women. That was the initial idea.
It seems to have worked really well. It’s funny – I just kind of dreamt up of this thing and then it slowly became a reality over the last three and a half years. It’s been a huge undertaking and all because it’s been something I’ve produced myself. It’s certainly been a considerable challenge. Creating art has challenges, the most obvious one being financial.
It’s certainly a large scale production and not just showing up and plugging in. There’s a lot of other stuff involved. It’s been nice though.
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Love-Song-Circus by Katie Noonan & C!rca will be performed at the City Recital Hall in Sydney on the 2nd and 3rd of April. Tickets can be bought at www.cityrecitalhall.com. Educational materials about Love-City-Circuscan be found at musicaviva.com.au
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