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Drift

Performance for spoken voice, electronic text & percussion

  • "One of the most compelling performers and brilliantly inventive poets of our time, Caroline Bergvall is completely in control of her stage craft and a master of multiple languages—ancient and modern. This is a truly international show—taking the audience beyond borders of language and time."

    —Rachel Lichtenstein, artist, writer and curator of Shorelines

  • "Drift marks a significant ethical engagement for poetry in these isles."

    —Cherry Smyth, Art Monthly

  • "Caroline Bergvall is a mesmerising performer - impossible to imagine someone more suited to perform her work. She's a solid, disconcertingly still presence in front of the floating clouds or storms of words behind her, all her energy poured into her voice's resonating depths. Sometimes words are crooned, sometimes half sung, sometimes interspersed with clicks of the tongue that echo a heartbeat, or passing time."

    —Alce Savill, Exeunt

  • "Bergvall speak-sings in a marathon show in which her powerful voice is the thread, the star our ship follows as audience."

    —Sophie Mayer, F-The Word

DURATION: 75mins

RELATED WORK: Drawings | Book | Installation

NOPING

Caroline Bergvall: Lead artist, text and live voice

Thomas Köppel: Electronic text projection

Ingar Zach: Sound composition & live percussion

OVERVIEW

As a live performance, Drift takes you on a journey through time and space, where languages mix, where live percussion meets live voice, where the ancient cohabits with the present. Nordic and Anglo-Saxon tales of exile and sea travel re-emerge to shadow today’s harrowing lives and losses during crossings of the Mediterranean. Each element of this work is integrated and moulded into a strongly connective, at times nearly archaic experience of being taken through the seas of history.

Premiered in the UK at Shorelines festival, Southend-on-Sea, Nov 2013. It opened Poetry International, Purcell Room, London, 2014 at the end of its UK tour. In Europe, recent sell-out shows at Festival de la Batie, Geneva, 2016.

Along with its published counterpart (with Nightboat, 2014), Drift was awarded a Cholmondeley Award for “contribution to poetry” in 2017 and the Centre Pompidou’s Bernard-Heidsieck Art Literary Prize (Paris) in the same year.

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BACKGROUND

The text for the performance was inspired by the language and themes of the Seafarer, an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem from the 10th century as well as drawing dirictly from official material from a current sea migrants’ tragedy. A contemporary meditation on migrancy, exiles and sea-travel. The dense electronic text landscape created by Thomas Köppel provides a kinetic and hypnotic reading and visual structure. It both allows and transforms the reading experience into a fluid and perceptually subtle mode of connection between live voice and textual material.

When performed in non-English speaking contexts some of this graphic text is translated into the main language of the region and integrated to the moving electronic projection. The beats, resonances and treated brushes of Ingar Zach’s subtle percussion work creates both a deeply meditative experience and a contemporary tribal pulse.

  • "One of the most compelling performers and brilliantly inventive poets of our time, Caroline Bergvall is completely in control of her stage craft and a master of multiple languages - ancient and modern. This is a truly international show - taking the audience beyond borders of language and time."

    —Rachel Lichtenstein, artist, writer and curator of Shorelines

  • "Drift marks a significant ethical engagement for poetry in these isles."

    —Cherry Smyth, Art Monthly

  • "Caroline Bergvall is a mesmerising performer - impossible to imagine someone more suited to perform her work. She's a solid, disconcertingly still presence in front of the floating clouds or storms of words behind her, all her energy poured into her voice's resonating depths. Sometimes words are crooned, sometimes half sung, sometimes interspersed with clicks of the tongue that echo a heartbeat, or passing time."

    —Alce Savill, Exeunt

  • "Bergvall speak-sings in a marathon show in which her powerful voice is the thread, the star our ship follows as audience."

    —Sophie Mayer, F-The Word

REVIEWS

Aine McMurtry: Sea Journeys to Fortress Europe: Lyric Deterritorializations in Texts by Caroline Bergvall and José F.A. Oliver in Modern Language Review, vol.113, no.4, Oct 2018. Abstract.

Walter Ronzani: Review Drift, at OperaEstate, Bassano del Grappa. In Il Giornale di Vicenza, 9 Sept. 2018. Italian. PDF.

Catherine Humble: Exposed to the Other: Responding to the Refugee in Caroline Bergvall’s Drift in Wilding Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life (London: Routledge, 2018). Book chapter.

Áine McMurtry: Giving a Syntax to the Cry: Caroline Bergvall’s Drift, Paragraph, Jun 2018, vo. 41, No. 2. Absract.

Katy Lewis-Hood: Clouding knowledge in the Anthropocene: Lisa Robertson’s The Weather and Caroline Bergvall’s Drift – Green Letters Studies, Ecocriticism, 2018 – Essay

Adelaide Morris: Forensic Listening: NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Caroline Bergvall’s Drift, and theContemporary Long Poem in Dibur Literary Jounal, Issue 4, Spring 2017 – PDF

Bruno Ríos: Drift de Caroline Bergvall in Literal Magazine. On translating Drift into Spanish. In Spanish. March 2017.

Caroline Bergvall: Infra-Materiality and Opaque Drifting in Minding Borders, eds. Adriana Jacobs et al, Legendia, 2017 – PDF – A recent research essay of mine on Drift. With colour photos by Tom Martin.

Clara Sankey: Drift Review
Feb 2015
This sense of directionlessness – the Vikings called it hafvilla: not knowing where one is on the sea – is the singular thread that ties the book together. Review featuring scans of some of the drawings in great new mag The Improbable.

Tim Freeborn: Shake that Microtone: Caroline Bergvall’s Drift
Nov’14
Essay just up as a special feature in Rusty Toque, Nov’14 issue

David Kaufmann: Drift book review in Asymptote
Oct 2014
“Caroline Bergvall’s latest book, Drift, is haunted by the loss of the thorn, the yogh, and Anglo-Saxon generally”.

Alice Saville: Drift at the Forge, London, Exeunt magazine
Oct 14
“Poet Caroline Bergvall’s Drift is a multi-millenniumal mashup of sea stories”.

Cherry Smyth: DRIFT review in Art Monthly – PDF – 
Oct 14. Review of the performance and the book.

Sarah Dawson: Drift at the Southbank Centre: I went to see
19 July 2014
I went to see Drift by Caroline Bergvall last Thursday. review of DRIFT live at the Purcell Room.

Steve Mentz: Caroline Bergvall’s Drift
2 June 2014
Gorgeous, intricate, impassioned writing. A review of the book and a reader’s report w/ other links

REVIEWS

  • "The book’s first section begins with a flummoxing series of sixteen line drawings. Mostly horizontal, sometimes partially crosshatched vertically or diagonally or developing into ovoid circles, they display gestures of line and smudge, redaction and emphasis, but no hint of alphabet. We find ourselves at the creative intersection of assertion and cross-out, musical staff lines awaiting notes, the exciting brink of language emerging from a lineated sea."

    —Dana Levin, Boston Review

  • "Bergvall is not interested in safe: her work has always looked to “go deep down in time and in body, to bare bones,” challenging readers and listeners to do the same."

    —Sophie Mayer, the f word

  • "It is a book as filled with ghosts as with beauty, as driven by intellect as by wanderlust—a richly rewarding and memorable experience."

    —Publishers Weekly Starred Review

  • "Bergvall turns ‘illegibility’ on its head: she insists on a poetics that is neither merely read nor impossible to read. Instead, Bergvall attempts to offer another way of being, necessarily multiple. This affords space for unknowing, for the unrecognizable, where political vision and perhaps even political intimacy and solidarity does not require immediate recognition within our normative configurations of the sensible and knowable."

    —Rebecca Teich, The Poetry Project Newsletter

3 poetic sequences, 2 ink drawing sequences, abstract maps on black pages, photographic work (by Tom Martin), and a longer essay. Expanded and revisited following the performance of Drift.

Designed by Pablo Lavalley.

Texts: Seafarer – Shake – Noping – Log

DETAILS

ISBN: 9781937658205
Nightboat Books, NY, 2014

Recipient of the 2017 Cholmondeley Award for Poetry

A riveting new volume exploring the power and provocation of medieval English and the trope of the seafarer.

Full publication of texts and research influenced by Anglo-Saxon and early medieval North Sea literature, alongside a report into a devastating migrant crossing of the Mediterranean left to drift despite being spotted on many radars.

Purchase

  • DESCRIPTION

    Caroline Bergvall’s Drift retraces the language and maritime imagination of early medieval North Atlantic travels from the sagas to quest poems to today’s sea migrancies. Its centerpiece is the song cycle, “Drift,” which takes the anonymous 10th century Anglo-Saxon quest poem The Seafarer as its inspiration. Both ancient and contemporary tales of travel and exile shadow the plight and losses of wanderers across the waters in this haunting new book. Drift is the second of Bergvall’s explorations of historical English language. The text sequences combine with drawings, maps, macro-photos to track these depths.

  • PRAISE

    Winner of the 2017 Cholmondeley Award as part of the 2017 Society of Authors Poetry Prizes. The Cholmondeley Awards recognise the achievement and distinction of individual poets, for their body of work and for their contributions to poetry. In their citation the judges said of Caroline Bergvall: “A pioneer, whose latest work, Drift, is spellbinding and experimental, taking language to strange limits, while engaging with one of the most pressing concerns of our time: migration.” 

    —Cholmondeley Award Citation

DRAWINGS

OVERVIEW

The first installation introduced and complemented the visual work of my project Drift. 2 drawing series developed in parallel to the 2 main poetic sequences of Drift.

LINES

A meditation on medieval line ruling prior to copying text. 16 ink drawings for the 16 songs of “Seafarer”.

BLOCK 16A6

Unicode for the runic Thorn letter. 14 ink drawings for the 14 pieces of “Shake”.

FOGS

4 large screenprints, embedded text segment, pigment on square background, to be hung as “sailsongs”.

“ZODIAC” CONSTELLATION

First painted mural.

BLOCK 16A6

A series of 14 ink drawings

FOGS

A series of 4 screenprints. Hung by ropes, or to the wall, front: lines from my Seafarer sequence, back: red stamp of runic letter.  Signed edition of 6. Produced by Matthew Rich, Jealous Prints Studios, London.

Blow wind blow, anon am I

OVERALL TEAM

Caroline Bergvall, lead artist
Ingar Zach, live percussion & sound composition
Thomas Köppel, programming and text projection
Michèle Pralong, artistic collaboration
Anne Portugal, poet, French translation

LINKS

Thomas Köppel
Ingar Zach

SUPPORT

Judith E Wilson Fellowship in Poetry and Drama, Cambridge, 2012-13
Sound & Music, UK, 2014
Penned in the Margins, 2014

VENUES

Shorelines festival, Metal, Southend on Sea, 2013
Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, 2014
The Forge, London, 2014
Bournemouth Festival, 2014
Norrlands Opera, Umeå Sweden, 2014
St Olavs Dagene, Trondheim Norway, 2015
Festival de la Batie, Geneva Switzerland, 2016
OperaEstate, Bassano del Grappa, 2018

ADDITIONAL THANKS

Rod Mengham, Judith E. Wilson Committee
Rachel Lichtenstein, Shorelines curator
Tom Chivers, Penned in the Margins
Stephen Motika, Nightboat Books, NY

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