| Traditional Svan Polyphonies |
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Workshop led by Vakhtang Pilpani, Nana Pilpani, Gioprgi Pilpani and Manoni Khergiani with the assistance of the actors of Teatr ZAR Thu-Sun 5–8 December, 4pm–7pm Laboratory Theatre Space Fee: 100 EUR Contact and application Please send your application form to Justyna Rodziñska-Nair: justyna@grotowski-institute.art.pl by 29 November 2013. We will get back to you within a few days. Applicants will be accepted on a first-come-first-served basis. The workshop will be conducted in English. Workshop as part of VoicEncounters, practical seminar  Workshop participants will learn polyphonic songs from the Svaneti region in northern Georgia, which possesses the oldest pre-Christian polyphonic musical tradition. Only about thirty of these ancient songs, sung in a language incomprehensible to the Svan, have survived to our day. Typical of Svan songs is the ephemeral interval between voices, that is the interval of an impure second between the first and second voice, usually performed by solo singers. The three-part polyphonic songs, which have been passed down orally over the centuries, preserve the memory of many generations. The workshop will culminate in a work demonstration, which will take place on 8 December at 7pm.  The “Pilpanis” were encountered in the mountains of Svaneti by Teatr ZAR on their expeditions conducting research into the oldest forms of religious music of Eastern Christianity, the essence of which are polyphonic songs of centuries-old traditions that have their roots in the beginning of our era and are probably the oldest forms of polyphony. Coming from Georgia, the region of Svaneti in the High Caucasus, the Pilpanis are a group of some thirteen singers led by Eptime Pilpani. All of the singers are residents of villages in the region of Mestia in the heart of Svaneti and most of them come from families with long traditions of folk singing. While Eptime Pilpani studied music in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, most of the singers have learned the songs entirely through oral tradition. With questions of living tradition/s and the next generation very much in mind, Eptime also leads a children’s chorus in Mestia. Pilpani, in one of his teaching sessions in 2002, demonstrated the singing styles of a number of villages: some were softer, others in a higher key, while his own, from the village of Lendjeri has a full-abdominal, resonant sound. His comparisons are enlightening, all the more so when it becomes evident that ZAR’s way of singing Zar is by no means mere imitation: it is an innovative transposition, for a generically different kind of performance, of what ZAR had first learned by fully making its own. One could call this the alchemy of raw material turned into theatre. Pilpani rigorously taught the 2002 group, breaking down the syllables of unknown words and connecting syllables to sounds. He continually repeated them and had his pupils repeat them, building up phrases and then whole lines, which the pupils had to sing with him as they caught the right vocal sonority, phrasing, and tempo. All of this had to be memorized, since transmission of Svan polyphony is oral, no one of it ever having been written down. Meanwhile, Pilpani’s pupils invented their own notation to help them absorb and remember what they were hearing and singing. The whole Pilpani–ZAR dynamics of teaching and learning conveys very precisely what it means to speak of an oral tradition and how it is transmitted from generation to generation. Maria Shevtsova, “Teatr ZAR’s Journeys of the Spirit”, New Theatre Quarterly 114, May 2013, p. 173. |