battery opera - [storm]

Ron Stewart and Yannick Matthon in [storm], Photo by Andrew Querner

The text in [storm] contains excerpts from the following sources; The Mabinogi (traditional Welsh stories), The story of Fionn mac Coumhaill in search of his youth (traditional Scottish/Irish story), Olalla by Robert Louis Stevenson, Homer’s Odyssey, Amos and Boris by William Steig.

Some of the additional source material includes Gericault’s painting, and studies for, The Raft of the Medusa, and various testimonies and accounts of that wreck and similar European wrecks in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. As well as traditional sea shanties, whaling songs and traditional songs addressing men returning from away and the things that follow (including Ten Thousand Miles, The Death of Young Andrew, Randall’s Lament, The Carpenter’s Song, Johnny’s Gone to Hilo, Farewell to Nova Scotia.)

Other source books include:

• In the Heart of the Sea by Nathanial Philbrick
• Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
• Rites of Spring by Modris Eksteins
• The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussel
• Ghosts have Warm Hands by Will R. Bird (Canada’s unappreciated Primo Levi)
• The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae, Dr. Jekyl and Mr Hyde and other Tales and Fables (I went on a bit of an R.L.S. binge) by Robert Louis Stevenson.
• The poems of Wilfred Owen.