Bando!, a new, mixed-arts storytelling collective, are bringing their first tour to Wales this month with Y Llyn – a bilingual retelling of the legend of Llyn Y Fan Fach. Hari Berrow talks to Bando!’s artistic director, storyteller Michael Harvey, about the show.
The tale of Llyn Y Fan Fach is one of Wales’ most beloved folk tales. The story, where a man marries one of the Tylwyth Teg who came up from his lake, is a tale of culture shock, misunderstanding and what happens when you don’t respect the ones you claim to love. It is the subject of Bando!’s first show – brought to life by Michael Harvey, dancer Eeva-Maria Mutka, and musician Stacey Blythe.
Michael Harvey brought Bando! together as he felt they had something new to offer the world of storytelling. “The first time I met Eeva-Maria, I met her at a workshop, and we did this mad, crazy, physical duet together,” he recalls. ‘I thought – I have to keep tabs on this woman! I don’t know how I can work with this but one day I will…’
“I’d also been working with Stacey Blythe, who is an astonishingly good musician and improviser – I think that’s the thing that pulls us together. When I’m telling a story I don’t have a script. The same things happen to the same people in the same order if I get my job done properly, but how it’s done varies according to the place, the time, and the people in the room. The three art forms we use are different, but the improvisation is the one thing we all do.”
Michael Harvey wants to bring a sense of dynamism to the storytelling space with Bando! “One of the things we try to do,” he says, “is to upset our own expectations – not doing the same choreography and the same music in the same order. We give ourselves permission to interrupt the normal flow, because that’s when you’re interesting, and we try to avoid illustrating.
“So with Stacey’s music, the thought process is: rather than doing ‘cold’ music, because it was a cold place in the script, how about doing something really specific and playing that? So she plays music that evokes ‘the wind that blows through the crack underneath the door’. That specificity makes all the difference.”
Michael Harvey is full of just as much praise for Mutka. “Eva-Maria is so strong onstage – very impulsive and very clear. We’ve developed this way of working where I’m the storyteller, trying my best to tell the story to the audience – and she’ll come up and touch me, or grab or push me, and I’ll just have to cope! And the weird thing is, when she does that, the audience makes sense of it. It’s just literally her pushing, pulling, grabbing, touching, but as an audience, you cannot stop yourself from seeing intention and emotion, even though in reality we are just playing.”
Y Llyn is bilingual, and Harvey is keen for first-language English speakers to feel like they have access to the Welsh language via the show. “We use the languages in such a way that people who have no Welsh, or little Welsh or are learners will still get everything,” he says. “Over time, working bilingually in various situations, I’ve been able to work out ways of giving the context of the story in English, so everyone gets what’s going on, and then when you move into dialogue or action.
“So, for people with not much Welsh, they leave feeling that they can sit through something that includes a high percentage of Welsh and they feel like they understand it because of the context. We make it so that people can understand what’s going on, even though they may not understand all the words.”
Y Llyn, YMa, Pontypridd, Sat 14 Sept; Theatr Felinfach, Dyffryn Aeron, Sat 21 Sept; touring Wales until Sat 9 Nov plus two dates in January.
Tickets: £8-£12. Info: here
words HARI BERROW
