In a staging of John Tavener’s “The Protecting Veil” at Clapton’s Round Chapel at Spitalfields Music Festival on Sunday, director Anna Morrissey led musicians and dancers from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in an expressive set of stage pictures, loosely following the scheme of Tavener’s work. “The Protecting Veil” collects a set of musical icons based on the life of the Virgin Mary and travels in a sequence through annunciation and incarnation, to lament, resurrection and eventually dormition.
The Round Chapel is a former home to Hackney’s large nonconformist congregations, and is now a beautifully restored arts venue. On a clean, dusky evening, the cello soloist Raphael Wallfisch sat slightly elevated at the back center of the rounded space, with rows of string players fanning out in a V shape. Four dancers led the movement from the front of the stage, though the performance’s central idea was in joining all creative elements together. From the moment the dancers rushed a silky white drape close over the heads of the string players, they were engaged fully in the constant flow of the piece, with each page turn, light switch, stand move delivered artfully and with slow intention. Long sections of the piece were memorized to aid movement. Two whole-ensemble processional gestures framed the work, which concluded with an ungainly curtain call that left Wallfisch stranded, taking the generous applause by himself.
In the UK, cross-disciplinary works that pair music with other disciplines—movement in particular—are especially in at the moment, and previous BarTálks have dissected similar performances that haven’t quite worked. Over negronis in Elephant, a slightly chaotic but pleasingly affordable bar in Clapton, we spoke about a performance we’d love to see again.
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