THE TELLING PROGRAM NOTES PLACEHOLDER

Into the Melting Pot is set in July 1492, in the home of a Jewess, Blanca. Time is running out in the face of Ferdinand and Isabella’s edict that Jews must convert to Catholicism or leave.

In a sense, this is the story of any man and woman in any period. The tools and language of persecution don’t change much down the centuries. And even in the short time since the writing of this show in autumn 2017, Into the Melting Pot has gained a new resonance in the face of the rise of anti-Semitism, the stories of individuals from the Windrush Generation, and enforced migration from Afghanistan, Syria and now Ukraine. Things haven’t moved on since 1492, it seems…

In the early 13th century, what we now know as modern Spain was a patchwork of five independent states (Castile, Leon, Aragon, Navarre and Granada). While each region and individual cities had different ethnic and religious allegiances, for much of the period different religious and ethnic communities lived side by side. Jews and Muslims had roots in the peninsula going back to the 7th century.

Blanca’s story echoes across time, with obvious resonances in Nazi Germany–but also earlier, in the Pogroms of 1391,when thousands of Jews were killed across Iberia. Yet for centuries, Jews, Muslims and Christians largely lived peacefully side by side on the Iberian Peninsula. Many had a fierce loyalty to their homeland, identifying with the rich cultural melting pot just as strongly as their own faith. For example, many Jewish women took traditional local names (Juana, Leonor, Isabella) rather than traditional Biblical ones.

The music in this film centres around two traditions: Alfonso’s Cantigas de Santa Maria and the Sephardic Jewish tradition, which are songs of love and longing. In between are Adalusian/Arabic traditional songs, the earliest song cycle by 13th century troubadour, Martin Codax from Galicia (the northwestern corner of Iberia) and Christian pilgrim songs from the Llibre Vermell, which was associated with the monastery of Montserrat.

The Sephardic songs are part of an oral tradition, many dating back to the period after the Spanish expulsion of the Jews and the subsequent diaspora as they settled across Eastern Europe and North Africa. Written in Ladino, a Spanish dialect, these songs connected Sephardic Jews with the country they still saw as their homeland.

Alfonso el Sabio (the wise)

When I started structuring the programme, I had an idealised view of King Alfonso X of Castile and Leon (born, 1222, reigned: 1252-1284). I knew about him first and foremost because of his musical legacy: the collection of 427 Cantigas de Santa Maria – songs in praise of the Virgin Mary.

My programme notes of the past refer to him as “a relatively liberal King, whose court included a mixture of Muslim, Jewish and Christian musicians.” The music of the Cantigas is indeed infused by this melting-pot of cultures and musical languages. The fact that Jewish and Muslim musicians were welcome at court was indeed in stark contrast to the rest of Europe which was largely taken up with The Crusades against the Muslims, while Jews were expelled from many European countries, including France, Germany and England.

But Alfonso’s “liberalism” was in part a political expediency. He inherited a patchwork land of ethnic and political tensions. But his tolerance only went so far, insisting that Jews have distinguishing marks on our heads. “You’re different – so wear your difference loudly.” We are within touching distance of Nazi Germany. And today in the UK, like Blanca, we try to convince ourselves: “It can’t happen – won’t happen here – not here.” Can we really be that sure?

Clare Norburn

INDIVIDUAL BIOGRAPHIES

Suzanne Ahmet is an actor working across Stage, Screen and Voice. Theatre Credits include: Mary Baldwin, Marvellous, @sohoplace, transferred from The New Vic Theatre; Susan, The Haunting of Susan A by Mark Ravenhill, The Kings Head Theatre; Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice; Mistress Page, The Merry Wives Of Windsor and Kaa, The Jungle Book for Storyhouse @ GPOAT 2021; The Ballad Of Maria Marten, Eastern Angles and Matthew Linley Creative Projects; Homing Birds, Kali Theatre; Saint George and The Dragon and Peter Pan for The National Theatre; Hard Times, Northern Broadsides; The Hoard Festival & Around The World in 80 Days, The New Vic; The Winter’s Tale, Sheffield Crucible; I Capture The Castle, Watford Palace & Bolton Octagon and Much Ado About Nothing and Dangerous Corner, The Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds. Screen credits: Netflix/BBC Drama: Inside Man; Teva Pharmaceuticals (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iApPT1YWomo); Adult Material & Gittins C4; Doctors, EastEnders & Jonathan Creek, BBC, Emmerdale, C4. She has worked as a development artist for The New Vic, (Marvellous); Shakespeare’s Globe, (Read Not Dead & Globe Research in Action); and The RSC (The Boy In The Dress). She also plays Blanca, Into The Melting Pot for The Telling, which is a feature film and live touring production.

Clare Norburn is a singer, playwright and producer. She has developed a new genre of concertplays, where music and drama collide including Beethoven’s Quartet Journey for the Dante Quartet (2016), Purcell, the Musical (2018); and with director Nicholas Renton, Breaking the Rules (2015) for the Marian Consort, Creating Carmen (2019) for CarmenCo and Galileo (2020) for the Monteverdi String Band and the Marian Consort. With her medieval group The Telling, her Empowered Women trilogy has had 39 performances and all three concertplays were filmed with Vision (about Hildegard of Bingen) being selected by The Guardian as an online classical highlight alongside the Salzburg and Edinburgh Festivals. More recently, Love in the Lockdown (2021), is an online play with music in nine episodes, and I, Spie (2021) about John Dowland’s brush with the Elizabethan Secret Service. Her productions have toured UK festivals and venues including LSO St Luke’s, Bridgewater Hall and St John’s Smith Square. Clare has sung as a soloist with many medieval ensembles, including her own group The Telling and back in the 00s, Mediva, and Vox Animae. With these ensembles she has performed at The Purcell Room, Bridgewater Hall and at leading festivals including Spitalfields Music, Brighton Festival, Newbury Spring Festival and Buxton International Festival. Together with Deborah Roberts, Clare co-founded Brighton Early Music Festival.

Maya Levy grew up to Israeli and French parents in New York City and has lived in London since 2006. A professional singer, songwriter, actor and theatre deviser/writer, Maya holds a BMus from the prestigious Oberlin Conservatory (in piano and voice), a BA in English and Theatre from Oberlin College, and an MA in Performance from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She is the Cantorial Soloist and Head of Musical Engagement at The West London Synagogue of British Jews, Marble Arch. Her focus in the last ten years has been on composing pieces of music theatre, songwriting and working as a professional performer. Her project ‘The Adventures of Nellie Bly’ is a one-woman show about the 19th century American reporter and daredevil, Nellie Bly. You can find Maya’s spoken voice on Ubisoft's 'Tom Clancy's The Division 2' game, and she is the lead singer for Buenos Klezmer.

Emily Baines is one of the most exciting and versatile musicians working in the UK today. A specialist recorder player, she is also a skilled multi-instrumentalist performing worldwide on shawms, bagpipes and other early reed instruments. Emily’s work as a performer involves a myriad of different roles, from concerto soloist and chamber musician to theatre band and actor/musician roles. As a musical director, she is in increasing demand; her main work is currently in drama from the medieval, renaissance and baroque eras using both period and more contemporary musical styles. As a researcher, Emily is predominantly interested in the performance of historical music; she is currently investigating the style of playing found in eighteenth-century mechanical musical instruments and how that influences contemporary attitudes to playing eighteenth-century music. Research plays an important role in all avenues of Emily’s professional life, from leading foot-tapping ensembles to scoring bloodthirsty Jacobean theatre.

Giles Lewin is equally at home in folk, medieval and Arabic music. In the 1980s he joined theatre company, The Medieval Players, playing rebec and medieval fiddle, and in 1987 became a founder member of The Dufay Collective. At the same time he was working with Irish band, After Hours. He has performed with June Tabor, is in a trio with Maddy Prior and Hannah James, and was a founder member of folk supergroup, Bellowhead. He has studied Arabic violin in Cairo with Ashraf Sharki and Abdu Daghr, and oud (Arabic lute) with Lebanese singer Abdul Salaam el Kheir. With singer Vivien Ellis he formed the duo Alva.

Born in Cornwall, Joy Smith first met a harp at 6 years old. When, at the age of 8, she inherited that very same instrument, it felt as if the harp had chosen her. Joy went on to travel the world with seven different harps and become an explorer of music and sound of all kinds. She is renowned for her thorough and exciting approach, creating programmes and performing music in the style and on the instruments they were intended for, from medieval to 21st century. Joy’s eclectic taste in music has led her to play in an array of venues from Royal Albert Hall to Glastonbury Festival and with diverse groups and artists from the Royal Opera House orchestra to Sophie Ellis Bextor. She is professor of Early Harps at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She enjoys learning the historically informed rules and then deciding when to break them.

Nicholas Renton comes from a musical family and studied mime in Paris with Jacques Lecoq. He began directing for theatre, then for television with films like The Interrogation of John, much of the BBC hit Hamish Macbeth starring Robert Carlyle, Far From the Madding Crowd, Andrew Davies’ adaptation of Wives and Daughters, and Uncle Adolf, Nigel Williams’ take on Hitler’s affair with Geli, his niece. The Russian Bride with Lia Williams, Guy Hibbert’s modern version of Therèse Raquin, won FIPA Prix D’Or in Biarritz. After making A Room with a View for TV with Elaine Cassidy, he was in Dublin to shoot an off-beat rom-com Little White Lie, in which she starred with Andrew Scott, and When Harvey Met Bob with Domhnall Gleeson and Ian Hart, the story of Bob Geldof and Harvey Goldsmith bringing LiveAid to Wembley. And later, three stories in the BBC’s Musketeers series.