Published in The Guardian
Ivor Cutler's songs lift Scottish dance
One weekend last summer, Ashley Page was sitting at home playing some CDs. The choreographer credited with revitalising Scottish Ballet was searching for some music to slot into Off Kilter, a show celebrating Scottish dance. He had, perhaps unsurprisingly, ruled out Hebridean psalms. "They did nothing for me in terms of choreography," he says. So he put on Ludo, a 1967 album of strange songs and poems by the late cult poet Ivor Cutler.
"My kids were hysterical," he recalls. "They were saying, 'What's this?' It became a family favourite. We were almost sick of hearing it." Glasgow-born Cutler, who found an odd sort of fame after playing the bus conductor in the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, was a hero to everyone from John Peel to the philosopher Bertrand Russell; more recently, he was the inspiration behind Franz Ferdinand's song Jacqueline.
Page, a former Royal Ballet principal dancer, began working on a sequence of eight songs from Ludo that somehow fuse humour and jazz, many of them powered by a pedal-driven harmonium. He concentrated on the more upbeat numbers, songs such as Cockadoodledon't and Good Morning! How Are You? Shut Up! This means Page's dancers have the rare experience of counting out time to a man singing about his "granny at the pictures biting all the buttons off the seats". Off Kilter, now touring, received its premiere in Edinburgh during the Hogmanay festivities, where audiences guffawed their approval at Paisley Patter, as the Cutler work is called.
It all sounds very unlikely, this union between a cult Glasgow poet, who died in 2006, and a choreographer with an OBE. But Page says we should not underestimate Cutler's skill as a musician. Produced by George Martin and performed by the Ivor Cutler Trio, Ludo is the most musical of his albums, with fewer of the spoken-word tracks that characterise favourites such as Jammy Smears and Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, Volume 2. Listen closely to Culter's hilarious tales of shoplifters lifting shops and astronauts dealing with dirty trousers, and you can hear the influence of everything from Calvinist hymns to calypso, from Middle Eastern chants to boogie-woogie.
"It's infectious, danceable music," says Page. "You laugh spontaneously because he's made it sound like he just sat down at the piano and knocked this thing out. One song repeats its verse three times, but the second time, instead of being two phrases of eight, it is an eight and a seven. It took me ages to work out why I couldn't make it fit."
To turn it all into a work for three dancers, Page took inspiration from a rhythm here, a phrase there, taking care to reflect Cutler's exuberant spirit while avoiding anything self-consciously comic. Sometimes he took the lyrics literally, turning the bucolic I'm Going in a Field (a hymn-like paean to lying in the grass with a lover) into a romantic duet. Other times, he let the music lead the way: the dancers make woodpecker movements to the woodblock tap of A Great Grey Grasshopper, a stream-of-consciousness fantasy that starts with a grasshopper leaving a mark on Cutler's trousers and ends up with Martians in space.
Performed in front of Oscar Marzaroli's famous black-and-white images of deprived 1960s Glasgow (featuring lots of knobbly-kneed boys in shorts playing in the streets), Page's 13-minute sequence has the odd effect of creating nostalgia, not for a happier time, but for one that certainly seems more eccentric, if not downright bonkers. It is one of the highlights of Off Kilter, the other being a world premiere of Cease Your Funning by New York wunderkind Mark Morris, set to some of the Scottish songs written by Beethoven between 1815 and 1818, using the words of Robert Burns and William Smyth. "There's a great drinking song in it called Sally in our Alley," says Morag Deyes, Off Kilter's mastermind. "It's very Germanic, but also quite balletic, delicate and pastoral."
Paisley Patter isn't the only work to take its inspiration from a rather unlikely source: the bill also features a piece inspired by Archie Gemmill's spectacular goal for Scotland against the Netherlands in the 1978 World Cup. Choreographed by Andy Howitt of YDance, the four-man work focuses on what is regarded by many as one of the greatest goals ever. "It's a four-minute piece based on the moves Gemmill made," says Deyes. "In the 70s, they didn't have multi-camera filming, but now we can see it from all these different angles. He curved his leg around, moved through, then ends up as this triumphal moment – fist in the air and head up."
Off Kilter, a defiant rejection of cultural stereotypes, has set its sights on the international market, with early interest from North America and China, so the Ivor Cutler dance could go global. "It's nice not to do an ultra-serious thing," says Page. "But what I've given the dancers to do is really hard – they're not just having fun."
© Mark Fisher 2010
Ivor Cutler's songs lift Scottish dance
One weekend last summer, Ashley Page was sitting at home playing some CDs. The choreographer credited with revitalising Scottish Ballet was searching for some music to slot into Off Kilter, a show celebrating Scottish dance. He had, perhaps unsurprisingly, ruled out Hebridean psalms. "They did nothing for me in terms of choreography," he says. So he put on Ludo, a 1967 album of strange songs and poems by the late cult poet Ivor Cutler.
"My kids were hysterical," he recalls. "They were saying, 'What's this?' It became a family favourite. We were almost sick of hearing it." Glasgow-born Cutler, who found an odd sort of fame after playing the bus conductor in the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, was a hero to everyone from John Peel to the philosopher Bertrand Russell; more recently, he was the inspiration behind Franz Ferdinand's song Jacqueline.
Page, a former Royal Ballet principal dancer, began working on a sequence of eight songs from Ludo that somehow fuse humour and jazz, many of them powered by a pedal-driven harmonium. He concentrated on the more upbeat numbers, songs such as Cockadoodledon't and Good Morning! How Are You? Shut Up! This means Page's dancers have the rare experience of counting out time to a man singing about his "granny at the pictures biting all the buttons off the seats". Off Kilter, now touring, received its premiere in Edinburgh during the Hogmanay festivities, where audiences guffawed their approval at Paisley Patter, as the Cutler work is called.
It all sounds very unlikely, this union between a cult Glasgow poet, who died in 2006, and a choreographer with an OBE. But Page says we should not underestimate Cutler's skill as a musician. Produced by George Martin and performed by the Ivor Cutler Trio, Ludo is the most musical of his albums, with fewer of the spoken-word tracks that characterise favourites such as Jammy Smears and Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, Volume 2. Listen closely to Culter's hilarious tales of shoplifters lifting shops and astronauts dealing with dirty trousers, and you can hear the influence of everything from Calvinist hymns to calypso, from Middle Eastern chants to boogie-woogie.
"It's infectious, danceable music," says Page. "You laugh spontaneously because he's made it sound like he just sat down at the piano and knocked this thing out. One song repeats its verse three times, but the second time, instead of being two phrases of eight, it is an eight and a seven. It took me ages to work out why I couldn't make it fit."
To turn it all into a work for three dancers, Page took inspiration from a rhythm here, a phrase there, taking care to reflect Cutler's exuberant spirit while avoiding anything self-consciously comic. Sometimes he took the lyrics literally, turning the bucolic I'm Going in a Field (a hymn-like paean to lying in the grass with a lover) into a romantic duet. Other times, he let the music lead the way: the dancers make woodpecker movements to the woodblock tap of A Great Grey Grasshopper, a stream-of-consciousness fantasy that starts with a grasshopper leaving a mark on Cutler's trousers and ends up with Martians in space.
Performed in front of Oscar Marzaroli's famous black-and-white images of deprived 1960s Glasgow (featuring lots of knobbly-kneed boys in shorts playing in the streets), Page's 13-minute sequence has the odd effect of creating nostalgia, not for a happier time, but for one that certainly seems more eccentric, if not downright bonkers. It is one of the highlights of Off Kilter, the other being a world premiere of Cease Your Funning by New York wunderkind Mark Morris, set to some of the Scottish songs written by Beethoven between 1815 and 1818, using the words of Robert Burns and William Smyth. "There's a great drinking song in it called Sally in our Alley," says Morag Deyes, Off Kilter's mastermind. "It's very Germanic, but also quite balletic, delicate and pastoral."
Paisley Patter isn't the only work to take its inspiration from a rather unlikely source: the bill also features a piece inspired by Archie Gemmill's spectacular goal for Scotland against the Netherlands in the 1978 World Cup. Choreographed by Andy Howitt of YDance, the four-man work focuses on what is regarded by many as one of the greatest goals ever. "It's a four-minute piece based on the moves Gemmill made," says Deyes. "In the 70s, they didn't have multi-camera filming, but now we can see it from all these different angles. He curved his leg around, moved through, then ends up as this triumphal moment – fist in the air and head up."
Off Kilter, a defiant rejection of cultural stereotypes, has set its sights on the international market, with early interest from North America and China, so the Ivor Cutler dance could go global. "It's nice not to do an ultra-serious thing," says Page. "But what I've given the dancers to do is really hard – they're not just having fun."
© Mark Fisher 2010
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