Fresh from their UK Premiere at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Claire Love Wilson & Peter Lorenz embark on a UK & Ireland tour of their heartwarming musical show, Morag You’re A Long Time Deid, weaving together silenced family histories and reimagined traditional music – a love letter to ancestors who ‘didn’t fit’.
25 September Arts Depot London – London
27 & 28 September Tobacco Factory Theatres – Bristol
Hi Claire! How are you doing? First up, tell us about your show Morag, You’re A Long Time Deid?
Hi Young(ish)- I’m doing well. MORAG (that’s the short name we use for the show) is an experimental music theatre piece that re-imagines traditional Scottish ballads through a queer perspective with loop pedals live on stage. We often say it’s a love letter to ancestors who “didn’t fit”. The story follows the journey of Sam, a queer Scottish-Canadian character, who inherits a piano from her granny Morag who died before she was born and whose story has been silenced in her family (this happens right at the beginning of the show). Sam goes on a musical journey, traversing sound landscapes of old Scottish ballads, imagining a queer romance, and filling the gaps left by ancestral silences.
You’ve been working on this show for 8 years with your collaborator Peter Lorenz – sometimes transatlantically. How has that process been?
Honestly, it’s been one of the most challenging and fulfilling experiences of my life. Peter and I met at a dance party in Glasgow 10 years ago. I was dancing quite wildly on the dance floor, and I tripped – Peter caught me, and we became friends and then collaborators. Who would have thought that such a chance encounter could lead to such a powerful and fruitful creative collaboration. We started working remotely before that was a thing! We’ve done small development periods in both Scotland and Vancouver, and have had a chance to work with incredible artists to create this work. Developing slowly and over time has actually been really satisfying, it’s allowed us to hone in on fine details, and get really specific about what we do and why.
What’s it like to finally be on tour with the work? Have you found Scottish and UK audiences different than back home in Canada?
Being on tour in Scotland and the UK has been amazing. Truly a dream come true. It feels like a homecoming for the show in a way- bringing this outsider diasporic perspective on Scottish and Celtic tradition and family history back to the source, there’s something very healing in it. The audiences are definitely different! I’ve found that in general, Scottish audiences really go deep with the emotional themes in the show, particularly around the theme of having people in the family whose stories have been silenced or who haven’t been properly grieved. That seems to resonate a lot with people here. Sometimes the crowd can be a bit more reserved – but not in a bad way, they just need a bit more encouragement sometimes to participate and loosen up. When we did the show in Vancouver, when we stage a ceilidh in the middle of the show, people would fly out of their seats to participate. Here we usually have to do some more coaxing, but it really depends on the crowd and the region we’re in.
Tell us about how you use music and sound manipulation in the show?
The music really carries the experience of MORAG. We start with ballads in quite a traditional form. Then, through different scenic moments, we begin to open them up with fresh music compositions, soundscaping on the loop pedal, and also re-writing lyrics live with the audience. By the end of the show, the music has totally transformed. We also use loop pedals in a very theatrical way that’s quite unique. We do conversations with characters where you’ll hear one side, and then it won’t all make sense until the other side is looped back. MORAG is like that and it’s something we get a lot of feedback about- piece by piece, the story weaves itself together, until at the end, you have a full tapestry.
How do audiences get involved in the show? We hear there are some opportunities to dance!
Indeed! We’ve built the audience participation very gradually. The idea is that the audience should feel a warm invitation to participate, but never pressure. MORAG is very intimate- we often say it’s a co-created experience with the audience. They are there with us, and the invitations to get involved grow throughout the work. I won’t give too much away- but there certainly are opportunities to have a wee dance.
Has it felt empowering to reclaim the old and imagine new stories for your Grandmother?
Yes, very empowering. The show comes from the seed of my own personal story of grappling to connect with the presence and silenced story of my paternal grandmother. In MORAG we take that seed and then really run with it. There is lots that’s true in the show, and lots that is also fiction. I really believe that ancestral memory lives in our bodies and that the more we connect with our own desires, imagination, and feelings we are also connecting with our ancestors. Culturally it’s also really empowering and important to use energies of imagination and play to approach traditions or ways of being in our families that aren’t working anymore. That process can often be quite heavy lifting- involving a lot of grief and healing work- which we explore in MORAG- but I also think there’s a really creative side to historical reclamation that is fun and magical.
Does queering the Scottish Ballads help you feel connected to your ancestors? Have audiences felt the same?
Yes! I’ve talked to lots of queer people who have an experience of looking into our family histories and encountering a void. An absence of stories about the queer people who came before us- or sometimes just these really fragmented details. The act of queering ballads presents this void and fills it with color and love. It’s saying, queer people exist in all families, everywhere, and they always have. I’ve really felt audiences respond to the act of rewriting old songs from a queer perspective- and when I say that, I actually mean the permission to imagine different possibilities then a dominant narrative. For me queerness is about sexuality yes but even more than that, it’s a permission to explore, play and innovate who you are and how you exist in the world. It’s about multiplicity and also community. Sometimes people are a little unsure at first but I love witnessing transformation that happens during the show for a lot of people, where they get on board and by the end, relating to the humanness of the story and the fun of being able to take old narratives or songs and give them refresh.
By the end of this tour you’ll have spent three months in the UK and Ireland. What’s next?
This has been an incredible experience- a kind of victory lap for this show and the result of a ton of hard work from our team, and especially on the producing side from myself and Peter Lorenz. First, we need to take time to rest and soak in this experience. Beyond that we are exploring options of some more touring for MORAG in the future, perhaps another UK/Ireland tour where we connect with some of the communities we weren’t able to visit this time around. We’re also looking at onward touring opportunities in Canada, Australia, Europe, Australia and New Zealand- but that all depends on feasibility and funding. It’s a tough landscape right now for artists to tour financially- so we always have to weigh different opportunities both from an artistic and business/producing perspective. We’ve been talking about recording an album of the show’s music for a long time, and I think this winter would be a great time to do it.