mezzo-soprano Rowan Hellier talks about her interdisciplinary venture integrating music & motion exploring the fascinating determine of Baba Yaga

Baba Yaga workshop -Ana Dordevic, Rowan Hellier, Carola Schwab – (Photograph: Pascal Buenning/Deutsche Oper)

Rowan Hellier is a mezzo-soprano who, alongside together with her operatic profession, is understood for creating tasks which blur the boundaries of style, self-discipline and aesthetic, typically centring on girls’s tales and her ideas have featured at main venues akin to Wigmore Corridor. On the Oxford Worldwide Track Pageant in October, Rowan is presenting her newest venture, Baba Yaga: Songs & Dances of Demise. This manufacturing combines music, dance, spoken phrase, and a specifically commissioned music cycle by Elena Langer. 

Baba Yaga workshop (Photograph: Tina Dubrovsky)

For the night, Rowan might be joined by pianist Sholto Kynoch, dancers Ana Dordevic and Carola Schwab and might be collaborating with choreographer Andreas Heise, whose model of Winterreise with Juliane Banse was a spotlight of the 2023 Oxford Worldwide Track Pageant. Baba Yaga is a co-production between Beethovenfest Bonn and Oxford Worldwide Track Pageant, and the brand new cycle by Elena Langer is an Oxford Worldwide Track Pageant manufacturing.

The thought for the present originated when Rowan was studying the writings of Mexican-American author and Jungian psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés, greatest identified for her e book Girls Who Run with the Wolves (1992). Rowan was eager about Estés’ concepts in regards to the wildness and knowledge inherent in girls and the way these relate to archetypes like Baba Yaga. She was fascinated by the ambiguities which Baba Yaga embodies; a determine from Slavic folklore, you do not know whether or not she is sweet or unhealthy. In some tales, she helps individuals and in others she hinders. She might be seen as an ogress, a snake, a dying determine, the shadow self or a matriarchal ancestress. All of which hyperlink to the thought of witches. 

Rowan is eager about reclaiming the thought of the witch as a substitute for society’s script for older girls. In a tradition obsessive about youth, this appears like a radical act, she says. The figures of actual witches had been initially drugs girls and healers in the neighborhood, but they had been then turned upon and persecuted.

For music, Rowan has turned to folks music, Slavic, Scottish, Lithuanian, in order that alongside Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Demise there might be music by Tcherepnin, Dvorak, Janacek, Jake Heggie and Tori Amos, plus Elena Langer’s new fee. 

For Rowan, Russian-born British composer Elena Langer is nice at constructing characters in sound and Rowan mentions the shimmering sounds that Langer creates. “With Elena’s piece, I needed to create a counterpart to the fantastic Mussorgsky Songs and Dances cycle, which is stuffed with dying, destruction and the horrors of warfare, but in addition vivid dance rhythms and life! In Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Demise, the Demise-skeleton lady strides throughout the battlefield within the last music, telling the lifeless and the dying that she is going to dance on their bones at a future midnight banquet so they could by no means rise once more. Within the compellingly ambiguous determine of Baba Yaga—she who guards the fountains of the water of life in a forest hut that spins repeatedly on hen’s legs—I see a extra nuanced tackle, or different to Mussorgsky’s feminine dying determine.“

With Langer’s Slavic heritage (she was born in Moscow), she knew about Baba Yaga and was very within the venture. Additionally, Rowan feels that Langer applies wit and a darkish sense of humour to her work so that there’s a playful factor to her items. For the brand new piece, she is setting, amongst others, girls poets of the Soviet Period, which brings an added thread of protest and resistance to the combo. Rowan has a long-time music duo partnership with Sholto Kynoch (inventive director and founding father of the Oxford Worldwide Track Pageant) and the 2 had been college students collectively on the Guildhall Faculty of Music and Drama. They mentioned the musical selections collectively, together with the choice of Elena Langer as composer.

Rowan hopes that they’re able to take the programme elsewhere as exploring Baba Yaga is an idea that ought to slot in numerous contexts, while the interdisciplinary strategy and various musical programme with jazz and pop influences combined with the classical will enchantment to a variety of viewers ages and pursuits.

This Summer season, Rowan is performing in Verdi’s La Traviata in open-air performances being given by Staatstheater Braunschweig; there are 16 performances in all. Additionally, Rowan has been jogging and taking dance lessons with a purpose to prepare to have the ability to sing and ‘leap round’ for 75 minutes in Baba Yaga. She admits that it’s a problem, however then she loves a problem and all the time finds herself pleasantly shocked at what we’re able to after we push ourselves. What the physique can do if you put your thoughts to it. And she or he has discovered this together with her voice, relishing the challenges of singing Giovanna Seymour in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena which opened her eyes to what her voice is able to.

She can be eager about what you find out about your self bodily and mentally by these challenges; dance requires consideration to anatomy, as does singing, however in a different way, combining these is a part of the problem and fascination!

Rowan Hellier (Photograph: Pascal Buenning/Deutsche Oper)

The Baba Yaga venture suits into the overarching theme centring on girls’s tales which are frequent to Rowan’s earlier tasks. She is eager about increasing the operatic and music canon both by commissioning new work or constructing new tasks to create extra nuanced feminine characters. She is eager to supply a substitute for the Madonna-Whore Dichotomy prevalent in a lot of the operatic canon in girls’s roles. To offer audiences extra nuanced, life like characters for girls but in addition to create such repertoire for future singers.

Her programme She Represents was impressed by Nineteen Twenties-30s artwork of the ‘New Objectivity’ motion in Germany (the title of a 1928 watercolour by Jeanne Mammen). The result’s a costumed lieder recital exploring feminine expression and definition of self, impressed by artworks by Mammen and Otto Dix depicting actual girls, with music by Rita Strohl, Kurt Weill, Cathy Berberian and others. The recital evokes a selected interval within the growth of the ‘New Lady’, a feminist best and icon of fixing gender norms,  for whom costume, behaviour and sexual liberation performed an essential position in bringing about adjustments in societal attitudes in direction of girls. Rowan premiered the present on the Oxford Worldwide Track Pageant 2023, opened Glasgow Cathedral Pageant 2024, and there are plans for future performances.

The programme Wom3n arose after discussions between three thirty-something girls – poet Hollie McNish, composer Kate Whitley and Rowan. This resulted within the music cycle Attractive Beasts which shaped the centrepiece of a programme impressed by feminine friendship in all its humour and forthrightness, alongside music by Judith Weir and Olga Neuwirth. Wom3n was notably carried out by pianist Sholto Kynoch and Rowan at Wigmore Corridor on Worldwide Girls’s Day 2022, and Attractive Beasts subsequently for an Affiliation of Girls within the Arts occasion at No. 11 Downing Avenue.

Baba Yaga workshop – Andreas Heise, Rowan Hellier, Sholto Kynoch, Ana Dordevic, Carola Schwab (Photograph: Pascal Buenning/Deutsche Oper)

Baba Yaga: Songs & Dances of Demise – Rowan Hellier, Sholto Kynoch, Ana Dordevic, Carola Schwab & Andreas Heise – 22 October 2025, Oxford Worldwide Track Pageant. Additional particulars.