THE CHALK CIRCLE (Composer)

For a bold reimagining of Brecht's monumental play "The Caucasian Chalk Circle", director Ealeal Semel chose to set her production in 1930s Palestine, and through her interpretation to question the idea of historic narratives and how they relate to the truth as experienced by peoples and the individuals within them.

Together with the director, we've worked tirelessly to harness the dramatic potency of the text within the context of a historic conflict which is still very much alive and relevant today, and to reconstruct the well-loved story whilst staying loyal to thematic intent of the original play.

From a compositional perspective, this included using Brecht's lyrics whilst attempting to completely re-invent the musical syntax that engulfed it. The research phase took over a year, and consisted of combing through hundreds of contemporary recordings of Arab-Palestinian, North-African Jewish, Eastern-European Jewish and Egyptian music, analyzing the melodic, rhythmic and harmonic richness that they presented, and building a vocabulary with which to enrich the story whilst harkening back to the traditions of the region in the early twentieth century. The final result grew to become an especially composed set of incidental pieces and six songs, sung in both Arabic and Hebrew.

To hear some of the demos for The Chalk Circle - please visit my SoundCloud