Cove Park Residency in Scotland
by Josephine Burton
I’m just back from a thrilling week in the wild Scottish highlands, starting a research and development journey towards a new Dash production. We are asking questions about contemporary migration to Europe and what defines European identity, taking inspiration from Virgil’s Aeneid.
Cove Park was a phenomenal place to work – entirely remote and self-contained. It rained and galed around us pretty much the entire time. The winds echoed through the rafters but we were fairly cosseted in a rehearsal room with its huge windows overlooking the loch. Occasionally the clouds lifted offering us sweeping vistas of rolling hills and empty landscapes, and we’d grab the opportunity to be buffeted on the porch, gasping at some bracing cold air.
Inside, we immersed ourselves in Virgil’s enormous epic, the Aeneid. We heard it in Arabic and in Farsi, English and stumbling Latin, and began to reimagine the tale of the wandering refugee from Troy in today’s landscape.
Alongside, Finnish/Iranian Kurd Marouf Majidi, the musical inspiration behind the project, I brought Ammar Haj Ahmed, our wonderful Syrian-born UK-based actor from One Thousand and One Nights and Chino Odimba, a UK-based fabulous playwright with experience of adapting classical texts and imbuing them with contemporary resonance. Alongside long shared meals, over the weekend, we read hours of verse, talked through personal experiences of migration, wrote music and lyrics and had lengthy conversations on how to make sense of the role of Gods and Fate in today’s world.
The significance of the timing was not lost on me. Here I was in Scotland, a country deeply ambivalent about its own future place in the world and currently powerless to change it, opening up one of Europe’s foundational stories, the Aeneid – the tale of a refugee whose family founds the Roman Empire – with three fantastic European artists, none of whom were born in Europe, on the very weekend the UK left the EU. We were navigating the past, present and the future simultaneously and the Aeneid, a poem which moves seamlessly through time, seemed like the perfect vessel for our journey.
With our huge thanks to Cove Park and to David Isaacs for supporting our residency.
Photos by Josephine Burton, Ammar Haj Ahmed and Marouf Majidi.
