The Time Has Come… Arcadia (2018), Barbican with Adrian Utley and Will Gregory Ensemble

Photo from Mark Allan 

“She realised that answer lay within her all along… everything is connected… the past is gone, the future’s unwritten…”

Paul Wright’s amazing Arcadia continues to reveal new meanings and having not seen it since the Before Times it has matured in an organic way to present an evolving commentary on the soil we plough post-plague and the mulch of political discourse. We stopped abruptly before we started though as few minutes into this performance musical director Ross Hughes – also synth, clarinet, flute, baby bass and drums, of which more later… motioned to cut as the click track wasn’t working. This was Arcadia Live and the nine musicians on stage had to gather themselves to start all over again and act as the musical conduit between the screen and audience.

 

Those first few minutes were played again and I swear sounded different to what we had seen and what’s more the film felt different too… all more urgent and more passionate than before. Co-composer Will Gregory wasn’t kidding in the post-match Q&A when he talked of the relationship between sight and sound and the audience and this was now an audience willing them on just as they dug deep and played with perfect pitch and eloquence. All of the right notes, in the right order and on the right instruments, extraordinary dexterity and deftly moving.

 

Gregory and Adrian Utley’s original score had featured snippets from Daniel Avery and, especially folk musical legend Anne Briggs, who gave her blessing to the use of her songs and the re-editing of her uncanny voice on The Time Has Come, My Bonny Boy and Lowlands. So, apart from having to present a complete score of their own making, the duo needed someone to sing like Anne and the, actually astonishing, Lisa Knapp filled the bill, strong and true, pitch perfect and yet with the haunting vulnerability that makes Briggs so meaningful, it was breath taking and one of the best live vocals I’ve ever heard: there’s no margin for error with notes these pure and she was totally present.

 

Victoria Oruwari, Lisa Knapp and Will Gregory (Photo from Mark Allan)

The score is so varied and complex that Gregory said each player had to be multi-instrumental, otherwise an orchestra would be required, so Emma Smith played violin, whistle, guitar, Francesca Simmons violin, synth and keys, Zami Jalil viola, synth and keys with Ivan Hussey on bass and cello. Oh, and everyone had to be able to sing too with only Lisa and the powerful Victoria Oruwari purely on lead vocals. For their previous work on Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, Uttley and Gregory had used a choir and larger group of players but here the multi-tasking was so precise you couldn’t tell where and from whom the sounds were coming from.

 

This, of course, reflects the fact that, as with all live film scores, the sound and vision blends together and you experience both at the same time; with your focus on the totality which, as Uttley said, is different ever time, every venue and each audience. So it proved for the audience too and Arcadia live was unlike any other Arcadia I’ve experienced before. With the music, as with the film, there’s a timelessness in everything and the answer is in our ears and beneath our feet, grounded in sound, our hearts the perfect click track for the marvellous expression. They played and we listened, all connected in appreciation and those time-stilled moments.

 

Arcadia remains a stunning mix of its source material and perhaps his background in fiction helped develop the directorial vision needed to make such a coherent narrative from this many disparate parts – separated in time and style – all sourced by Paul Wright from the BFI archive and elsewhere before being subjected to the alchemy of his editing and his ability to juggle meanings so adeptly. There's a strangeness that feels like period folk horror, that rich seem of unsettling pastoral tales from The Wicker Man to Children of the Stones that took the ghosts of our rural past and used them to chill our urbanised present. We’re, literally, rootless and need to find our feet again, standing on the soil. In Wright’s narrative – and in the source materials - the suggestion is that we have lost something in the transition sparked by industrialisation “…from a time when we were connected to the land and to each other…” to a world of isolation. This is probably even more the case now than in 1948, 1965 or 1975 and if you don’t believe me, look again at that device you’re reading these words on.

Adrian Utley and Emma Smith (Photo from Mark Allan)

Starting with the microscopic worlds of Frank Percy Smith we see the almost unseen life beneath, moss and lichen growing, tadpoles gestating… then switch to the macro world of ploughing fields and sowing seeds. It’s a passionate programme of delicious slices of English whimsy but not without a dark side – a child (Jenny Agutter, from I Start Counting (1970) ) crying out “mummy, mummy!” in terror, miners being attacked by policemen, urban isolation and dark deeds abound: there’s something unsettling in the country but its natural balances are undermined by explosive urbanisation…

There’s country dancing, May poles and May Queens, Morris dancing and nudists too – more than I recall - all connected to the grass and the mud. And did those feet…? Jerusalem emerges with added themes and Blake’s meaning, yet, curiouser and curiouser, none of the images can be taken at face value any more. This alchemy is signalled by section headings like Into the Wild, Folk, Utopia, Amnesia, The Turning and In a Dark Wood… It as if Syd Barrett had written the mood board. Blood in the Soil is perhaps the key and the connections are made elegantly again and again shifting the feeling forward by association, image and music. This is where Anne comes in and tonight Balham’s finest, Lisa Knapp, musical proof of the countryside continuum.

The dance is a key part of Arcadia and whether it’s acid house, punk, Morris or psychedelia we all love to move, hitting down on the ground in eternal rhythms, a little faster here and there but essentially the same animal celebration. Sometimes we dance for the May Queen, or we fling burning barrels at the Beltane fire festival, we dance in protest but mostly we dance to connect.

Dancing days

Wright says he always tries to use images from “all angles and even from different states…” he didn’t want to show just filmed theatre. His source material was a mix of documentary and drama with films like Herostratus (1967), Winstanley (1975) and Anchoress (1993) mixed in carefully so as not to drag the narrative off course. Literally thousands of films were considered and around 100 made the film with Cecil Hepworth’s Alice in Wonderland (1903) and A Day in The Hayfields (1904) being amongst the earliest. Hippies older and younger are featured from Pioneers of Nudism (1938) to Tribe of the Sun (1972) and there are dark tones indeed from An Untitled Film (1967) and The Watchers (1969).

Ultimately Arcadia is a tone poem for us to interpret as we will in despite the specifics of word, action and song. It’s an intimate multi-media dialogue with some very talented and careful individuals who have produced something far greater than the sum of its parts: Arcadia, the feeling won’t go away and it could be the grounds on which we take our last stand? 

As I wrote on its first release, Arcadia is *exactly* the kind of thing you’d hope the BFI would do: a film that highlights the wealth of content in its archive and which makes something bold, beautiful and new. It’s challenging and sometimes disturbing but if we’re not disturbed sometimes we’re only dreaming. I really hope there’s more like this but for now, Arcadia takes a breath on our video shelves and Mr Wright gets back to fiction! The initial score and DVD are both available from the BFI and beyond, wouldn't it be good to have a live album too?

What a send off this was!