Noise of the Past

Noise of the Past has developed a call and response method to creatively cast a different light on war, memory and the art of dialogue. It puts into play a series of interactions to make it possible to remember and converse beyond nationalistic and militaristic consensus.

Noise of the Past is a creative engagement with post-colonial histories of war, principally funded by the AHRC. The project has commissioned two inter-related pieces on remembrance, colonial legacy and the global war dead. Both seek to make a public intervention. They were launched in Coventry Cathedral and are available for, film screenings, music performances, touring events and installations either together or as individual pieces.

1. Unravelling is an evocative short 20 min. film written and directed by Kuldip Powar, with a haunting original soundtrack by award winning composer Nitin Sawhney. This film invites us to explore our own ambivalence towards collective and personal stories of war. Through poetic motives the film is a searching exploration of remembrance, colonial legacy and belonging in contemporary Britain. Developed from a unique call and response method, the director wove textured visuals and poetry with Sawhney’s score, to deliver a powerful ‘unravelling’. 
   
   The film is inspired by an inter-generational poetic dialogue in the Urdu language, between the director and his Grandfather Sawarn Singh – a War Veteran who was a soldier in the Indian Army that fought for the British in WWII: in Burma; the Middle East and Africa. Sawhney responded to the poetry, creating an intricate moving score that serves as a starting point for Powar’s carefully crafted imagery. What emerges is a sensory experience that is both evocative and haunting. 
   
   
2. Post-Colonial War Requiem is composed by Francis Silkstone as a spatial music performance. It takes both the inter-generational poetic dialogue between Kuldip Powar and his grandfather Sawarn Singh as a point of inspiration, as well as Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, which is in itself a pacifist piece and turns it around to face the colonies.

Silkstone changed the order of some sections of the poetry, repeating or omitting lines, combining lines which appear far apart, so as to reveal new meanings and connections in a live dramatic dialogue between actors in spatial interaction with architecture, and in a call and response between alternating, and overlapping, sections of music and poetry. Commemorating war heroes sometimes seems to renew enthusiasm for war, but this poetry invites us to honour the forgotten heroic sacrifices made whilst remembering the cruel futility of all war. A reminder of how Wilfred Owen’s poems from WW1 so powerfully interlaced Britten’s War Requiem – a masterpiece that honours fallen heroes whilst delivering an unmistakable pacifist message.

For further details, contact the Project Co-Directors N.Puwar@gold.ac.uk