“When did you two first start talking about this project?” I ask my guests. It’s January 14, 2020 and The Indigo Project, the latest in a long series of thematically based multimedia projects from the fertile curatorial mind of Tafelmusik’s Alison Mackay, will open on February 27. We sit surrounded by samples of indigo-dyed fabric, some old, some new, some borrowed – all very definitely blue. A fat binder of images from which Raha Javanfar is designing the projections for the show, sits on the table; over the course of the next
45 minutes, Mackay dips into it from time to time.
“Around a year ago …?” Mackay says, looking inquiringly across at Suba Sankaran, her prime collaborator on this project. “These things always take about two years to incubate...maybe a bit before that…I would have to go look at email. I began to think about this as a topic when I was working on Safe Haven. I have always been very inspired by the work of Natalie Zemon Davis – she wrote the first Return of Martin Guerre and she’s in her 90s now – she’s Aaron Davis’ mother, if you know him – and she’s just won, a couple of years ago, this enormous international history prize because she’s one of these cutting- edge people, examining court documents and things like that for written records that give glimpses into the lives of people who, perhaps as the less powerful, fall through the cracks of history. And she has done a lot of work on Sephardic Jewish refugees who went to Surinam and then in turn became plantation owners, and there was one family that were indigo growers there. I asked her to read the Safe Haven script for me, and she had some suggestions; but she also gave me some material about indigo at that time and it made me think, oh this would be a compelling topic! …”
“Compelled” is exactly the right word to describe the effect germinal ideas like these have on Mackay. A voracious reader and indefatigable hunter-gatherer; the fruits of her inquiries spill out in conversation in a stream of “so’s” and “ands” and “buts,” as she weaves, like the shuttle of a loom, the stories of all the trails she followed while the project was coming together.
“And what was the thing that most grabbed you when Alison invited you to collaborate?” I ask Suba Sankaran.
“The whole challenge and specificity of bringing the thing to life,” she replies. “The idea of marrying the story of how indigo travelled, not just geographically and historically, but musically as well. Also the fact of its roots not just being in India, but specifically in South India, is where one of my specialties comes in. And then Alison said ‘I’m thinking about you and one other person to work along with you,’ and I immediately thought of my father, Trichy, as the perfect candidate for that. He was born just outside of Thiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu, which was the heartland for the cultivation of indigofera tinctoria, and also the seat of the musical activity we would need to explore here.”
“It’s been wonderful!” Mackay chimes in. “Often with projects like these, I am out of my own depth musically – relying on the work of scholars...so to be working musically with collaborators you always hope for someone who’s not only a dynamite performer but also has some scholarly knowledge of the repertoire as it might have been in the 17th and 18th centuries, and so you can only imagine how thrilled I was to have Suba and her father [Trichy Sankaran is a Carnatic master percussionist, composer, scholar and educator], who have so much knowledge and very, very deep historical roots to share.”
“For your father, was the fact that this is all so specific to his own birthplace and musical tradition a strong incentive to get involved?” I ask Suba Sankaran.
“Absolutely!” she replies, “and on various levels. He and I have a very special connection, especially when we are on stage together. Growing up it was always that beautiful blurry line between daughter and disciple. So there was that aspect. Then, also, there was the aspect of marrying Western and Eastern Hemispheres, with new information being gleaned from both sides. And the fact that it was so close to his birthplace, I think hits very close to home on various levels: everything from his upbringing right through to what we call the gurukula system [how things pass from] the guru to the disciple. He had a very strict upbringing; the chance now to bring the music together with his personal life in his formative years was I think very, very compelling for him.”
“Blue Gold”
For all the major European colonial powers, the economic heft of indigo cake – “blue gold” as it was called – during the time explored in this project is impossible to overstate.
“It became so popular,” Mackay explains, “that once they realized its potential they started to grow it in the plantations in their new colonies: the Dutch, as I already mentioned, in Surinam; the French in Haiti and Louisiana; and then the English a little bit later in South Carolina, and it was really because of that ….”
“Louisiana [named after Louis XIV, King of France from 1643 to 1715] sounds like a cue!” I quip.
“For me it’s always important to tie these projects in authentically to the Tafelmusik repertoire, so it made sense to concentrate on the 17th and 18th centuries,” Mackay replies “and then, also, to bring it up into the present. There are chapters to the story: we begin at the court of Louis XIV because Colbert [French politician who served as Louis’ Minister of Finance] wrote a treatise about indigo dyeing. Colbert had to keep a middle course between this new economically advantageous and technically better dye from the East and the old blue dye of woad … so in every vat of indigo for dyeing in France there had to be a little measure of woad in order to start the fermentation of the vat. I’m sure it didn’t really keep anybody happy, but it may be that it led to an especially gorgeous colour of blue!”
Balancing the Louis XIV court chapter in the narrative is one on the South Indian court of Thanjavur: “There was a music-loving Raja there at the end of the 18th century,” says Mackay, “and he had a library in it with early editions of Corelli and Handel works, for his own edification, from visiting English tradespeople; he also had a musical instrument lending library, so that Europeans who were working in the textile trade or various aspects of his business or diplomacy could borrow instruments or editions of music.”
“With the British Raj in India you would often have this kind of influence and confluence of cultures and traditions,” Sankaran continues. “So there are many stories of how the South Indian composers would hear the marching bands and be influenced in their writing. One example, that unfortunately is on the cutting room floor of our particular project, was quaintly titled “English Note” – where they purposefully decided to eliminate all of the microtonal inflections inherent in the South Indian music, in order to make it sound that much more Western. Very fascinating, and there are many stories like this.”
Story follows story as our conversation unfolds: about forced conversion of subsistence economies to cash crop economic production of indigofera tinctoria – both in Tamil Nadu and Europe’s colonies; about how a six-foot length of dyed “guinea cloth,” sailing from Amsterdam to West Africa would buy, and sell, a man into slavery in the indigo and cotton plantations of the New World; about how the word “jeans” derives from the port of Genoa, and the word “denim” from “serge de Nimes”; about how Handel made his fortune through investments in the South Sea Company with its indigo connections...
Mackay leafs through the binder of images on the table. “This is one of the women who helped to found the London Foundling Hospital that Handel was also so involved with; there she is, dressed in an incredible indigo outfit; and this is a statue outside the boys entrance of a so-called blue-coat school, where children of the ‘worthy poor’ wore blue coats and blue dresses which certainly by the time of Handel were dyed with indigo. So it was used to dye coronation robes, the clothing of the highest in society, and of the absolute poorest; such an interesting parallel that for the first time Tafelmusik is experimenting with some of the street-ballad music from England and France along with the court music.”
“For me,” Suba Sankaran says, “there was this equivalent crystallizing moment soon after Alison and I talked. I was touring India with Autorickshaw and I remember seeing a concert of folk music, and as soon as I heard some of the sounds of particular sticks they were using (which are not used in classical Indian music), it made me think of the sounds of the loom and weave – I thought ‘ok I need to park this in my brain and do some further research.’ And then I brought that back to my father here in Toronto, and said ok so I heard this -- what can we do to find a piece that might harken to that time of that particular work period with those sounds that may have been heard in that environment. So in the South Indian thread we’re dealing with harvest music, agricultural music, and really folk music – the music of the people, from the people travelling from region to region, so more like work song, field songs that we had from this time...”
The project, Sankaran says, has been “a huge learning curve, and a learning experience…The aspect of the collaboration that is quite beautiful from the South Indian perspective is that not only are we covering a lot of the very traditional classical music from various centuries, but also some of that folk music – music that was written specifically for dance in the Thanjavur court we were talking about, then slightly more contemporary works towards the end, and then of course one very specific example of how the English influence works its way back into the South Indian classical repertoire. It’s really fascinating to run the gamut in that way from deeply traditional, right from the roots, through to wherever it is all going now: whatever that key to the door to the future is.”
Tafelmusik in Changing Times
Going all the way back to Mackay’s The Four Seasons, a Cycle of the Sun in 2003, she has shown an uncanny knack for harnessing, to use her earlier phrase, “compelling topics”: with a geographical axis straddling continents, or societies, or musical solitudes; and a second axis that slices across centuries, joining then to now through the lens of the human condition. The current project does all that, but something else is also going on here, speaking to Tafelmusik’s awareness of their own changing role as an arts organization.
One example small but significant example is the links they established in the context of this project, with MAIWA, a Vancouver-based company advocating for the continuation of traditional craft techniques and natural dye use: “The people at MAIWA,” Mackay says, “talk about every piece of cloth telling a story, the story of the people who make it, and – this is my next step, my take – the story of the taste and the aesthetics and the economic position and the values of the people who wear it. The more you know about these things the more you need to think about your choices.”
A second thing: there will be 50 school students, from vocal programs at Earl Haig and Unionville Secondary Schools, singing with the orchestra in the mainstage concerts (a first for Tafelmusik), performing both European baroque works and South Indian classical music, joined by several members of the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir. Sankaran has worked with both groups, “giving them the South Indian Music 101, the whole Carnatic system – raga, melody; thala, rhythm; the codified hand gestures, getting them to sing the microtonal inflections. I absolutely love that. It goes hand in hand with the way we learn Indian music in the first place – children are strongly encouraged to just absorb, to immerse themselves in it. Whether you open your mouth to sing one note or not is inconsequential. It’s osmosis, you gather it.”
The third new element is four daytime performances for a total of about 2000 TDSB students, planned for the week following the mainstage concerts – “a scaled down but not dumbed down” version of the mainstage show, with active participation, based on the history of denim. At time of writing, plans for this hang in the balance, pending settlement of the Ontario government’s dispute with our teachers.
The final student-focused element of the project is, thankfully, not in doubt. In the fall, a Grade 10 art class at Marc Garneau High School in Thorncliffe Park created a indigo-dyed art work – a quilt made up of squares of organic cotton from India dyed, using various “resist” techniques, with natural indigo. This quilt will be installed at Jeanne Lamon Hall for the concerts, and has a powerful significance for Mackay and Sankaran. Mackay explains: “In the course of the project, students were told about the London Foundling Hospital I mentioned earlier, which is of course a story of family separation. Mothers stayed anonymous, so they wouldn’t be discouraged from coming, but they would cut pieces of fabric from the baby’s clothing (which was usually made from the mother’s clothing) and then the mother would take half, with the other half kept in a printed form that the hospital would keep, just in case – so if the mother fell on good times, there would be a record and she could reclaim her baby. The forms were kept sealed until sometime in the late 19th century at which time they were opened. And so now they have thousands –3,500 or something – almost unique examples of fabrics people wore. Women paying for the Foundling Hospital dressed in their indigo velvets and silks, and the poorest imaginable in London also being dressed in indigo. The students at Marc Garneau found this very, very touching. And in this project that they are doing, they’ve dyed their squares using indigo tie-dye techniques and are embroidering or appliqueing pieces of fabric that speak somehow to their own family or friendships; some even, apparently, inspired to talk to their parents about some of the pieces of clothing they brought with them. I think it’s amazing – another one of these stories that a piece of cloth will tell.”
The Indigo Project runs February 27 to March 1 Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre. Consult tafelmusik.org for details.
David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com
