NEIL COOPER

Katarina Livljanic dreamed about founding her own choir ever since she was a little girl growing up during the 1970s in a small Croatian town where she was surrounded by churches. After she was taken by her parents to a festival of medieval music in one of them, Livljanic was left wide-eyed and captivated by the meeting of pure vocal sounds in such a highly-charged acoustic environment. That was when the idea of Dialogos, the choral group she eventually founded, and for whom in Edinburgh she directs twelfth-century classic Tondal’s Vision in Latin and Church Slavonic amid Canongate Kirk’s splendour, was born.

"It was a revelation," says Livljanic in her Paris home. "It opened up my senses in a way I can’t explain. I compare it with a vocation, and one that is still going on today."

It’s easy to understand Livljanic’s awakening to such holy music, which in Tondal’s Vision at least, combines a magical realist narrative with six voices in a minimalist staging it would probably be sacrilegious to dub with such a simple term as musical theatre. By all accounts Tondal’s Vision was one of the most popular stories of the twelfth century, spinning a yarn about a medieval knight who fell asleep at a banquet, only to dream of his spirit being taken to hell and back.
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"It was written by a nun," Livljanic says, "and has its origins in Ireland. Sources indicate that it was so popular in the middle ages that it was translated into many languages. One of those was Croatian, which was how we discovered it. The story is really about a near-death experience, about a man who leaves his body and travels in this other world, where he’s shown all these images of the pains he will face if he lives his life the way he does. It’s a precursor to Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the storytelling in it makes for a hugely interesting voyage. Our work was to find music that would match a story that had lots of liturgical references the way this one does."

The solution was found by delving into the roots of a polyphonic Croatian musical tradition from the same period that is performed in a particular vernacular not always familiar to western ears. As directed by Livljanic, though, rather than aim for historical authenticity in its staging, Dialogos is aiming for a contemporary, if somewhat stark, stage interpretation.

"I didn’t want to do an archaeological reading," Livljanic insists. "We’re not trying to recreate a medieval liturgical drama, because it wasn’t staged in that way then. My idea was to take the text, which is extremely modern anyway, and stage it in a way that speaks to audiences today rather than make it a museum piece. That would just be boring.

"But that is a very hard balance to get, because to do it completely modern with a very heavy staging would only distract from the story.

"Secondly, it also has to be mobile, because this is a story that has already travelled the world, and we need to be able to do that as well.

"So the use of movement and costume is kept very light, and doesn’t suggest any particular time. The six women who perform it are used as one body but with different voices. We’re working on the same principal as a Greek chorus, in that it moves as one, but is always changing."

To date, Dialogos’ version of Tondal’s Vision has travelled with other music theatre pieces as far afield as America, Mexico, Canada, France, Spain and Germany, right back to the story’s Celtic roots in Ireland.

"When I do this programme," Livljanic points out, "which is so steeped in Croatian history and music, something that a modern audience in other countries in the world today would barely be able to understand, I’m always surprised at how much they enjoy the experience. There’s something universal about the story and the music that seems to carry over beyond language."

After her childhood epiphany, Livljanic founded Dialogos in France in 1997, since when the company has carved a slow but steady niche for themselves. With a large network of performing associates to choose from, the material and scale of its work isn’t always so downbeat. The context of performing in churches, though, adds extra layers of seriousness to each performance’s common denominator of a medieval framework, both in its delivery and the response to it.

"The opportunity to hear these six voices in full flight," Livljanic enthuses, "really encourages the best response. I try not to do too many projects, but prefer to make things special. Dialogos is very much a labour of love."

As for the symbolic resonances of Tondal’s Vision in a 21st century riven by war, greed and other aberrations, in such a momentous year of scandal and financial collapse, they’re pretty obvious. Not that Livljanic is in any way shy of stressing their significance in the piece. "The images are so violent," she says. "They’re telling biblical stories in this almost naive way. But today we do live in a world that is full of garbage and noises and sounds we pollute the place with every day, and that stops us concentrating on things that matter. That is what I see in Tondal’s Vision. That suffering he sees when he’s led from the body, if we could all see that from afar, we might be able to say, Oh my God, why are we living like this’? Then we might realise what we have beyond that, and be able to get back to living in the way that we are meant to."

# Tondal’s Vision, Canongate Kirk, August 24-25, 9.30-10.40pm; www.eif.co.uk/tondal


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