Deep Wheel Orcadia is based on the award-winning verse novel by Harry Josephine Giles. A fusion of performance, music and image tells the story of Astrid – who, on return from art school on Mars, meets Darling, a Martian hiding on a space station struggling for survival. Written in Orkney dialect, this spellbinding production includes music by BAFTA-winning composer Atzi Muramatsu with direction by Susan Worsfold.
In this interview Harry Josephine Giles discusses the show which is currently touring in Scotland.
How does Deep Wheel Orcadia challenge traditional perceptions of minority languages, particularly Orkney Scots, in a modern or futuristic context?
I suppose this relates to something I talk about a lot, which is that minority languages, particularly in a Scottish context, and quite commonly, I would say, in a European context, are often taken to be languages of rurality, languages of the past, languages of agricultural community, languages that are dying, changing, fading. This is a discourse that's developed for a couple of 100 years. It's a discourse in which minority languages are the other to the majority language of the colonial state, and the result of this is that people tend to conceive of their own languages as belonging to the past and always fading. In the future, there might be this minority language. And my language, which comes from an island community, is as if not more capable of talking about science, futurity, change how people are in different worlds as any other language. I think it's better than English at doing that, because when you're working in a minority language, you're always pushing against what the language can do.
What role does the language of Orkney Scots play in the storytelling of Deep Wheel Orcadia and how does it enhance the themes of belonging and survival?
That's all about what it's like to live in a place and breathe with that place and make that place into a home. So, all those things that I'm describing are about how people are making a home, and certainly home, anyone feels alienated by their home at some point. Right home is also alienating because you can never measure up to the ideal of home, but it's still a home.
In what ways does the fusion of performance, music, and verse in Deep Wheel Orcadia contribute to its exploration of queer identities and human connection?
I don't know. You'll have to tell me. When you watch it, you'll have to tell me. What I can tell you is that the way that I develop performances, and this will be the third or the fourth performance, that I've developed with working with musicians in particular, and musicians and other artists too, but particularly working on a methodology for poetry and music collaboration is that what I am trying to do is to reach into something very, very old about poetry, which is that it's a performance form. It's a theatrical form that once upon a time, live music, live poetry and live theatre were all the same thing, that that is all the same thing if you're looking at, let's say, Greek drama, like ancient Greek drama. And I want to kind of tap into that again, right? You could, I don't know whether that's queer or not. Maybe it is. Somebody tell me. And what's exciting about it for me is, rather than considering of poetry as this kind of fixed text, the single, authored thing that then has to have, like a single interpretation.
It's entering poetry into that kind of semi-improvisational space of collaboration that, like gig music, can happen in that like when you have a poet trying to work live with musicians, and we respond to each other in a live way. Then, then some other kind of performance can happen that really excites me. And certainly, there's something about human connection in there.
How does the setting of a dilapidated space station add to the sense of isolation and alienation experienced by the characters Astrid and Darling?
I’m going to challenge the terms of this question. Because I'm from a rural community. People come and visit the small island, and they see rusting farm equipment and broken-down houses and mess in the farmyard, and they think, Oh, how dilapidated, how isolated, how impoverished, how alienated everyone must be in this environment, I don't see that. I see history. I see people saving on to things. I see people making do. I see a community of humans, and more than human things, starlings, swallows, the wind, stones, all these things, collaborating, in an ecological sense, to make a community. And that's, it's not, it's not clean. It's not tidy. It doesn't look like, it doesn't look like, I don't know your, your sci fi dream sustainability city of like, white concrete and soaring steel platforms. It looks like somewhere that's lived in, where people are making do, where community can happen in an evolving sense.
There's nothing about dilapidation that is about isolation and alienation. It’s all about community. That's all about what it's like to live in a place and breathe with that place and make that place into a home. So, all of those things that I'm describing are about how people are making a home, and certainly home, anyone feels alienated by their home at some point. Right home is also alienating because you can never measure up to the ideal of home, but it's still a home.
What is the significance of having the story told entirely in Orkney Scots with English surtitles, and how does this choice influence the audience's experience of the play?
What I want is to centre a minority language and to minoritise English. So why is English in the subtitles and why is it minority language on the stage? Because the minority language is the language of the performance, and we are making a playful concession to English audiences who might not follow it, and say, Listen, you can understand. You can keep up, but here's some subtitles to help you along, but you tune in your ears to what I'm saying, and maybe you'll understand this language too. But here, here's a here's an access measure for you the majority language audience.
How does the original score by Atzi Muramatsu complement the emotional and thematic elements of the narrative?
Atzi and I have worked on this for years. Atzi’s music has evolved alongside my poetry, and my poetry is all involved alongside Atzi music, our two interpretations of this world have influenced each other from quite early on in the writing process, and so I think that's important to say, Atzi has brought, has done something really beautiful, which is to use some Orkney folk motifs which are there and are recognizable, especially if you know, for Orkney folk music, Catriona Price is her first violin. Is an Orkney folk musician. Not just a folk musician. A multi genre musician is also bringing some of that sense. So, they're bringing these folk styles and motifs in along with a sort of contemporary classical sensibility that I think does this work of connecting traditional forms with contemporary forms with imagined future forms. We have these kind of three times, time, spaces, space, times of music that are happening at the same time. And that is also what I'm trying to do with the words, is that these are words that reach into the past and project into the future in a story that's happening in the present. So, I think we're both doing those things, and we're winding around each other as we do that.
What is the importance of setting Deep Wheel Orcadia in a science fiction space environment, and how does it provide a unique lens through which to explore rural and minority languages?
Science fiction settings where everyone speaks the same language, I find those apocalyptic My God, a galaxy where everyone speaks the same language, horrible, a galaxy where everyone's using automatic artificial intelligence translation, so they don't have to learn each other's languages. Horrible. Horrible futures do not bring universal peace and understanding. What that brings is domination, right? The only way to have a peaceful world is a world in which we learn each other's languages. So, a science fiction future which doesn't account for minority language and out of the way places is I, yeah, is not, is not working its imagination properly.
Of course, people on a distant space station are going to speak in a different way from people in the science fiction metropole.
Harry Josephine Giles mentions the need to demonstrate that Orkney Scots is as much about the present and future as it is about the past. How does the play achieve this goal?
I doing a sci-fi story show in Orkney Scots to project my language into the future and to say in the future, there will be a minority language. In the future, there might be this minority language. And my language, which comes from an island community, is as if not more capable of talking about science, futurity, change how people are in different worlds as any other language. I think it's better than English at doing that, because when you're working in a minority language, you're always pushing against what the language can do.
How does Deep Wheel Orcadia reflect the broader struggles of rural and minority communities to preserve and celebrate their cultures in a rapidly changing world?
I suppose this is the big theme of the show, this show is a love story. The central thing is about two people from different backgrounds who meet on a remote Space Station and fall in love and have a bit of conflict. The background is that this space station is dealing with enormous social economic change that is wrought by a change in the energy and travel infrastructure of this space faring culture. This is a history that is drawn directly from Orkney history, Orkney is a place that was once the crossroads of empires when sea travel was the main place that the Norse Empire and the British Empire used in their own forms of colonization, and Orkney was a place that both of those empires travelled through and was important to in lots of ways. And then we shift from sea travel to air travel, and Orkney becomes a different sort of place. And similarly, Orkney is an oil economy that is now shifting to a rural renewable energy economy. Huge cultural and technological shift that is happening on these islands, which are a laboratory of wind power, tidal power, wave power, hydrogen power. Like all of this is happening in a rural space more than it is happening in an urban space, right? So, science fiction and thinking about stuff like faster than light travel becomes a useful lens for thinking through some of those conflicts in a playful way. So that's kind of part of the thing that I'm at, and something else that I'm at is using the science fiction setting of a distant space station, which is a trope that lot of people are familiar with, and using that not as a starting point for the hero's journey, not as a brief place that your gang of misfits travels through, but as the centre of the story, the community that this story is about. So, this is a challenge, as much to science fiction as to everything else. It's saying, what happens when we take somewhere that is conceived of as peripheral and say, no, this is actually the centre of a world. What is that world and what matters in that place when it's the centre of the world.
What makes Deep Wheel Orcadia a groundbreaking work in the intersection of queer narratives, linguistic preservation, and speculative fiction?
You'll just have to tell me if it's groundbreaking or not. But I'll tell you what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to push against linguistic preservation. I'm not preserving anything. I'm pushing forward, along with other people that are pushing forward and writing this as a living language now, as a living language into the future. I don't want to create a list of words that never changes. I want to make this a be part of this as a living language that is supple and interesting and exciting to move into the future. So, if that's groundbreaking, I hope I'm breaking ground with a bunch of other people. I think rather than breaking new ground, I would say that what I'm doing is digging in some very old soil that I care very, very much about, that I'm digging where I stand. I'm digging in my place of home, and I'm turning over like the farmers that I grew up with, in my own way as a writer, I'm turning over that soil in order to keep growing a culture that matters to me, in order to think about how that culture can continue growing, which means continuing to change into the future.
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