1 00:00:17,540 --> 00:00:26,670 Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies podcast, series two, Episode five, Fairy and other transformations. 2 00:00:26,670 --> 00:00:30,720 Hello, I'm Faye Hield and I Caroline Larrington. 3 00:00:30,720 --> 00:00:37,670 We've been talking a lot about modern fairies in the project and we haven't said so much about Loathly Ladies. 4 00:00:37,670 --> 00:00:44,520 The Loathly Lady was a separate theme in one of the folders in the original series of stories that the artists had. 5 00:00:44,520 --> 00:00:49,440 The Loathly Lady is a hag who is really if she wants to be a beautiful woman, 6 00:00:49,440 --> 00:00:54,420 she encounters the night in the forest and helps him solve a problem that he has. 7 00:00:54,420 --> 00:00:59,100 But the cost of that is he has to marry her. He doesn't really want to marry a hag. 8 00:00:59,100 --> 00:01:08,280 But if he manages to solve a particular question or problem that she puts to him and the problem is making up his mind between two alternatives, 9 00:01:08,280 --> 00:01:11,790 and he needs to have the common sense to give the choice back to her, 10 00:01:11,790 --> 00:01:17,100 then the story can be resolved by her transforming from the hag into the beautiful woman. 11 00:01:17,100 --> 00:01:21,150 That would be an ideal one. So that's the original locally lady story. 12 00:01:21,150 --> 00:01:28,270 But the artists were particularly interested in it and nobody much except for Sarah took it up. 13 00:01:28,270 --> 00:01:33,940 We'll hear some of Sarah's Instagram poetry towards the end of this pulled coast. 14 00:01:33,940 --> 00:01:39,580 But the artist did find the theme of transformation in itself quite fascinating. 15 00:01:39,580 --> 00:01:46,000 Alongside discussing the materials Caroline supplied in the folders, the artists were encouraged to go off and find their own stories, 16 00:01:46,000 --> 00:01:49,840 which touched on the fairy theme like Ben's journey into World War Two. 17 00:01:49,840 --> 00:01:54,880 We heard about in the last episode, this sometimes meant wandering quite far afield, 18 00:01:54,880 --> 00:01:59,020 partly because of Jackie Morris's involvement in the early stages of the project. 19 00:01:59,020 --> 00:02:07,290 At a point where she was really interested in painting animals off the back, the Lost Words project, a thread about selkies began to emerge. 20 00:02:07,290 --> 00:02:17,050 Selkies are both a Scots word for sale and a kind of magical people who live in the sea in selkies skins, but can remove them to become human on land. 21 00:02:17,050 --> 00:02:23,890 In many stories, a man captures the selkie bride by stealing her seal skin and forcing her to remain with him. 22 00:02:23,890 --> 00:02:30,750 But the selkie woman never forgets where she came from. And part of her is always longing to get back to the sea. 23 00:02:30,750 --> 00:03:39,480 If Lucy prattled, so caught on the line. But. 24 00:03:39,480 --> 00:04:10,910 Bray spell. From the fall of. 25 00:04:10,910 --> 00:04:15,490 The silky theme became a point for a lot of discussion within the workshops. 26 00:04:15,490 --> 00:04:22,870 Beginning with Lucy and Terry and then bringing in many of the artists who then went on to make their own selkie works. 27 00:04:22,870 --> 00:04:29,990 Lucy wrote a round for a choir that she directs. That exactly expresses the selkie woman's position. 28 00:04:29,990 --> 00:04:38,550 She's caught between sea and land, between home and her old family and her new family, particularly her children. 29 00:04:38,550 --> 00:04:54,140 And in the round, we can hear the conflicting voices of the husband calling her back and her own voice declaring that she must and she will go. 30 00:04:54,140 --> 00:05:39,960 To. But. 31 00:05:39,960 --> 00:05:53,560 Where do I go for me? 32 00:05:53,560 --> 00:05:58,270 That was in the bay and and singing Lucy's brand, 33 00:05:58,270 --> 00:06:04,480 Nazli made an animation and beautiful sea blue collars of a woman diving and twisting through the waves. 34 00:06:04,480 --> 00:06:12,070 Somersaulting in and out of seal form, never resting in one shape, but always restlessly switching between forms, 35 00:06:12,070 --> 00:06:21,190 suggesting that there may be a way in which the Salkey woman can have both her children and her life on land and to swim with her people in the sea. 36 00:06:21,190 --> 00:06:28,860 Selkies, the animal that is not the magical creatures sing amongst themselves and humans can sing to them. 37 00:06:28,860 --> 00:06:38,260 To Enga talks about singing to the Selkies on Fair one summer and drawing one of the seals into the shore to listen to her, 38 00:06:38,260 --> 00:06:46,000 Mary recalls, when she was just a little girl singing to women, singing in the cell Selkies on a beach near Glassco. 39 00:06:46,000 --> 00:06:58,230 You can hear their stories now as a child and go down to the beach and sing to the SEALs, which we do is sell peace and the lunar surface. 40 00:06:58,230 --> 00:07:02,430 Many of the coastal areas around the north of the UK. 41 00:07:02,430 --> 00:07:08,620 And during the summer, I went back up to fair trial and thought I would try singing in the South Seas again. 42 00:07:08,620 --> 00:07:14,200 So I was up at the north end of the island will be is called the North Haven, 43 00:07:14,200 --> 00:07:33,930 and there were several seals in the B and I started to sing this little melody, which kind of goes like this. 44 00:07:33,930 --> 00:07:42,990 And so on. And I got interest from the SEALs, several, several of them came in closer to the surf and hung a boat and watched for a while. 45 00:07:42,990 --> 00:08:12,150 But there was one young female seal. It was Betty and. We came right on the edge of the water and I waded into the sea. 46 00:08:12,150 --> 00:08:15,960 And maybe they run with each other. She never left us. 47 00:08:15,960 --> 00:08:18,940 She stayed up just the very edge of the sun. 48 00:08:18,940 --> 00:08:25,350 And probably if I went to the other end of the beach, she came and she followed me along there and then followed me back. 49 00:08:25,350 --> 00:08:32,550 And at one point, I was singing a way to this one Salkey and some people that I knew worked from a yacht to move down in the pier, 50 00:08:32,550 --> 00:08:36,660 condemned and with talking to my father, who said. 51 00:08:36,660 --> 00:08:43,080 What's she doing? And my dad, in a very nonchalant, nonchalant fashion, just said, she's just singing in the south. 52 00:08:43,080 --> 00:08:51,990 He's one of my earliest memories is when I was little, 53 00:08:51,990 --> 00:09:00,020 I grew up in Wasco and I used to go into what I was called summer holidays and a Glasgow city, which just emptied a fair fortnight fear. 54 00:09:00,020 --> 00:09:05,580 And it was special changed in Glasgow Central. I remember Gondo New Year all excited Nick on the train. 55 00:09:05,580 --> 00:09:09,320 Good title too. We must be old again at any of these. 56 00:09:09,320 --> 00:09:13,260 And you go coast or say or Denoon if you available. Amy one summer. 57 00:09:13,260 --> 00:09:17,340 I don't know how we'd managed it, but we went to Denoon and it was exciting and it was wonderful. 58 00:09:17,340 --> 00:09:35,580 No busier and was one day we were down the beach and I saw these two ladies and they were singing to Selkies. 59 00:09:35,580 --> 00:09:40,820 I'm terrified the living daylights out of me was a sick person in my. 60 00:09:40,820 --> 00:09:48,500 I must only be in about two or three. And it's a really vivid memory because the wedding dress strangely ended with just two women. 61 00:09:48,500 --> 00:10:12,010 I was half scared that maybe people would choose. Two women singing sent the same peace and singing in the same place, just sit in. 62 00:10:12,010 --> 00:10:18,460 I also wrote two songs which you can hear on my album rap line called The Storm and Swirling Eddies. 63 00:10:18,460 --> 00:10:21,040 They capture different points on the journey. 64 00:10:21,040 --> 00:10:27,760 The moment when the selkie meets the man and when she's weighing up the decision to return to her SEAL people. 65 00:10:27,760 --> 00:10:37,390 All the materials from the different artists fell on the selkie storyline at different points, giving contrasting and conflicting emotional responses. 66 00:10:37,390 --> 00:10:42,960 A show developed from this performed at the Being Human Festival in Sheffield in 2019, 67 00:10:42,960 --> 00:10:49,720 while the artist felt was important, was for the narrative not to become tied down to one fixed set of emotions. 68 00:10:49,720 --> 00:10:55,690 And being a selkie or a contemporary woman involves a lot of shapeshifting and emotional flux. 69 00:10:55,690 --> 00:11:00,780 You can see a short film from that performance on the Modern Faries website. 70 00:11:00,780 --> 00:11:04,630 They research the best known of all the Scottish witches. 71 00:11:04,630 --> 00:11:13,780 Isabelle Gouty, Isabelle used to visit the king and queen of fairy land in an underground mound near her home in northeast Scotland. 72 00:11:13,780 --> 00:11:20,770 And there she would be given good things to eat. You would transform into animals in order to travel to the fairies. 73 00:11:20,770 --> 00:11:29,530 A cat or a crow or a hare face song takes Isabel's own words taken from the transcript of her 74 00:11:29,530 --> 00:11:37,090 trial evidence in which Isabel tells us about her own spell of transformation he had face. 75 00:11:37,090 --> 00:11:42,250 Tell us about how she arrived at the tube in Oxford at the first workshop. 76 00:11:42,250 --> 00:11:51,130 I remember standing and talking with anger about the nature of the different art forms, the visual arts and the linguistic and the musical. 77 00:11:51,130 --> 00:11:56,500 And we were talking about the nature of magic as well and the reality of magic. 78 00:11:56,500 --> 00:12:00,710 And Tao spells are often linguistic. And you. 79 00:12:00,710 --> 00:12:08,560 You have words to a spell. You say a spell, a magic happens. And we were interested to explore how music might tie in with that. 80 00:12:08,560 --> 00:12:16,090 So this links to the ideas in the second episode where we were talking about how music taps into those visceral qualities. 81 00:12:16,090 --> 00:12:25,300 So we looked at a spell, the idea that music and language are linked with musical notes being given letter names. 82 00:12:25,300 --> 00:12:33,700 So there is an inherent link there with musical notes being given, letter names, ABC, E, etc. 83 00:12:33,700 --> 00:12:43,060 And we've toyed with the idea of music following the letters within the spell and if that could actually work or if it would just sound horrendous. 84 00:12:43,060 --> 00:12:46,880 So it went away and Jackie Morris supplied me with this. 85 00:12:46,880 --> 00:12:52,060 The connexion to Goudey spell a real spell came from real confession. 86 00:12:52,060 --> 00:12:54,820 So this is it. We wanted to work with real magic. 87 00:12:54,820 --> 00:13:04,510 And so I wrote out the words of Isabel Gouty and to transform them slightly into my language rather than the thick Scots, which they were. 88 00:13:04,510 --> 00:13:08,950 They were originally written and coloured in all the letters which corresponded 89 00:13:08,950 --> 00:13:14,230 with a note name and then copied those over onto transcript musical transcripts. 90 00:13:14,230 --> 00:13:21,390 And they became the key points of the tune for the song. And so the words as they were being sung shifted slightly. 91 00:13:21,390 --> 00:13:25,270 There's a bit of repetition in the song as it appears now to fit the melody. 92 00:13:25,270 --> 00:13:30,610 But the melody came out of the words and it took a bit of knocking into shape to be musical. 93 00:13:30,610 --> 00:13:37,690 But a lot less than I expected. And even though it is a quite strange tune, I think it is what it's been described as fairly catchy. 94 00:13:37,690 --> 00:13:57,650 And I think it really is magic. The music definitely coming out of the woods yet to hear some of the Hezbollah. 95 00:13:57,650 --> 00:14:07,140 I shall. Going to go into his sorrow and go, I shall go. 96 00:14:07,140 --> 00:14:11,690 To go into his sorrow. 97 00:14:11,690 --> 00:14:17,100 So I go to the devil in the devil's name. 98 00:14:17,100 --> 00:14:22,850 Stay. I come home again. I go to the devil. 99 00:14:22,850 --> 00:14:27,430 Whose name I like. Oh, my God. 100 00:14:27,430 --> 00:14:34,440 I'm going to go into McKerrow when the black is strong. 101 00:14:34,440 --> 00:14:51,130 I shall go to go to the corral with the black crow. 102 00:14:51,130 --> 00:15:01,230 Slave states like, again, I shall go to go. 103 00:15:01,230 --> 00:15:51,360 Jeff Blackshaw. I saw a guy. Name say like a moment. 104 00:15:51,360 --> 00:15:58,460 I shall go in to go in to. With sorrow. 105 00:15:58,460 --> 00:16:21,920 I shall go to go to. OK, I go to. 106 00:16:21,920 --> 00:16:31,580 Inspired by Fay's account in her song of The Journey into the Heart, several wonder what it might be like to be the hair itself taken over, 107 00:16:31,580 --> 00:16:36,230 possessed by the strange and powerful voice that comes from outside the body. 108 00:16:36,230 --> 00:16:58,740 Sarah wrote some words about this and facings them here. 109 00:16:58,740 --> 00:19:45,660 Chico. Lastly, we come to another shapeshifting creature, The Lonely Lady. 110 00:19:45,660 --> 00:19:50,250 The other part of the project title are artists didn't engage with this theme very much, 111 00:19:50,250 --> 00:19:55,710 except for Sarah, who took on the identity of Alison locally, an Instagram poet, 112 00:19:55,710 --> 00:20:00,030 and created some short poems for her persona, putting them up on Instagram, 113 00:20:00,030 --> 00:20:05,070 along with some photos that captured some of the strangeness in the city environment. 114 00:20:05,070 --> 00:20:11,240 Here's Brian reading a couple of Sarah's poems. Alison Luthi speaks. 115 00:20:11,240 --> 00:20:16,850 Tell everyone I am tired of watching the forests burn. 116 00:20:16,850 --> 00:20:25,240 It is time for us to remember. We have always been a species of magic. 117 00:20:25,240 --> 00:20:37,070 Jackie Morris replies. Tell everyone the green man stirs evilness, leaves turn to gold. 118 00:20:37,070 --> 00:20:49,710 He comes. When the artists talked about the shapeshifting elements, all tightly linked to human emotion and analogies for human experience. 119 00:20:49,710 --> 00:20:58,490 These stories seemed to be useful to people in understanding their world and navigating their way through human experience, through their animal lens. 120 00:20:58,490 --> 00:21:02,280 The stories weren't about really transforming into animals, 121 00:21:02,280 --> 00:21:08,040 but rather thinking analogously about what it's like to be another kind of creature 122 00:21:08,040 --> 00:21:12,900 and how that might help you to think differently about your life as a human. 123 00:21:12,900 --> 00:21:20,160 The actuality of turning into a hair is the topic of a new piece of work being developed by Fay Terry. 124 00:21:20,160 --> 00:21:24,660 Sarah Enga for the Alternative Stories podcast series. 125 00:21:24,660 --> 00:21:29,520 So keep an eye on the old social media for links so that when that appears, 126 00:21:29,520 --> 00:21:34,860 we hope you've enjoyed listening to these podcasts about the modern fairies and locally latest project. 127 00:21:34,860 --> 00:21:39,810 Don't forget to take a look at the website where you can find more about our work with illustrations, 128 00:21:39,810 --> 00:21:43,620 films, an interesting blog posts from the artists. 129 00:21:43,620 --> 00:21:49,470 Although the project may be technically over, the modern fairy artists are still taking forward the work they've produced. 130 00:21:49,470 --> 00:21:59,310 So look out for their poems, songs, films, music, animations and artistry, and maybe even a stage show appearing all over the country and beyond. 131 00:21:59,310 --> 00:22:07,980 But for the moment, it's goodbye from us. We're going to leave you with one of Sarah's poems, Common Ending, 132 00:22:07,980 --> 00:22:15,570 which tells us all about the traditional endings of different kinds of folk and ferry stories from across Europe. 133 00:22:15,570 --> 00:22:22,750 And it's read once again by Bryan Monroe. Coleman endings. 134 00:22:22,750 --> 00:22:28,220 And they all lived happily ever after a bell rang and the tale comes to its end and they all lived. 135 00:22:28,220 --> 00:22:31,850 My story ends and the spinach is eaten by the goat and they all live. 136 00:22:31,850 --> 00:22:37,730 This is the end. Run away with it. And they all lived happily. Return my story and feed me bread. 137 00:22:37,730 --> 00:22:42,380 And they all lived. And if they're not dead, they still live happily and they whistle, whistle. 138 00:22:42,380 --> 00:22:45,830 The story is done. And they all lived happily ever snipped snaps. 139 00:22:45,830 --> 00:22:49,700 Now then the story was out and they all lived red reder. 140 00:22:49,700 --> 00:22:53,150 This tale has ended and they. And it was or it was not. 141 00:22:53,150 --> 00:22:58,610 And they all lived. Come in the pumpkin and come out in the square and they all lived lost. 142 00:22:58,610 --> 00:23:25,389 The three apples fell from the sky and they all lived a cat in the bowl put up his tail, their ends, the fairy tale.