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Dateline: 26th June, 2005 News from the North East
Guilding the LilliansA new guild of women theatre producers has been set up by a group based in Newcastle upon Tyne. Their first production, a re-working of the award-winning, Get Up And Tie Your Fingers, by Berwick-based writer Ann Coburn, will be premiered during this summer's International Festival of Rivers and the Sea on Tyneside. The women, all professional performers, writers, directors or theatre practitioners with strong ties to the North East, hope that The Guild of Lillians, as the organisation will be known, will be a place where original work can be nurtured and new opportunities for female artists created. The Company's first production has created such an opportunity for around fifty women. The Guild has commissioned an original score for female voices by RSC composer Karen Wimhurst and, in the first collaboration of its kind, has teamed up with The Sage Gateshead to form three choirs drawn from women across the North East, who will perform at The Sage Gateshead, The Customs House, and The Saville Exchange in July, alongside the three professional actresses in the piece. The play is being staged and performed by an entirely female team and the group has had the support of other professionals on Tyneside, including: actor Charlie Hardwick (Emmerdale); NTC Touring Theatre Company; and the late Julia Darling, the poet, novelist and playwright - a friend and performer with the play's Director, Fiona MacPherson and its co-producer Kay Hepplewhite, in poetry performance group, The Poetry Virgins. The production team has also made contact with modern day women in the fishing industry to record the sounds of their voices and working environment as part of the soundscape of the piece, with help from Poetry Virgin Ellen Phethean, a Guild supporter and The Sage's sound artist in residence. Get Up And Tie Your Fingers is set in 1881 in Eyemouth around a true event, when a hurricane hit the village's fishing fleet leaving 263 children fatherless. The title of the work refers to the practice of tying rags around the fingers to protect them from the gutting knife. If the fleet came home while people were still in bed, a caller would have to wake the women, hence: "get up and tie your fingers!" It is the story of three women who gut the herring; about the ties between a mother and a daughter and about the possibilities for change in ordinary women's lives, even in the harshest of circumstances; and it asks "when should we let our children go?" Only when the hurricane hits the fleet, do the women in this touching and delicately told tale of love and loss find out. The International Festival of Rivers and the Sea is a Newcastle Gateshead Initiative event and is part of 2005 Alive. The play produced with the support of Culture 10 funding. Get Up and Tie Your Fingers will be performed at the Customs House, South Shields on 14th and 15th July' at the Saville Exchange, North Shields from 19th to 22nd July and at the Sage Gateshead on 24th and 25th July. Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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