“Our civilisation is founded on coal” wrote George Orwell in 1937; at its peak a century ago, Britain’s coal-mining industry employed more than a million people. Today the figure is under 700 and many of the former mining communities have never recovered. That gargantuan decline forms the backdrop to this unusual audio-visual show: a haunting and often deeply moving requiem for an industry and its people.
Time spent in England’s mining areas has allowed Brooklyn-based quartet Sō Percussion to develop an understanding of industrial power and the lives of those who once helped build it. Performing in sacred spaces – cathedrals and churches – in these former coal-mining areas gives From Out a Darker Sea an elegiac air. Haunting electronic noises and held vocal notes hang in the air like coal dust. Xylophones, bells and percussion beat out the hypnotic rhythms of a working pit.
Using art, film and photographic backdrops, the performance divides into four chapters. Coal and Flower contrasts idyllic yellow fields and the black mineral that lies underneath. Someone paints over the day’s newspaper in black and yellow and the pages are then transported over the audience via a pulley. Four Portraits (filmed in former mining region East Durham) depicts the mundanity of modern lives, compared to the toil and sweat of mining, as people eat a simple meal or toy with a Playstation.
For the third chapter, Harold and Sylvia, quartet member Josh Quillen delivers a narrative in the persona of a wife turned carer of a miner with motor neurone disease. Quillen intersperses her comments (“My first husband was a miner, too, but he died of throat cancer, from the dust”) with his own motor neurone sufferer father’s diary (“Apr 5. Weak. Limp. Intestinal distress”). An eerie silence precedes the final chapter, which musically soundtracks the screen testimony of a north-east miner who saw his young workmate killed in the pit in the 80s and then journeyed with the body to the surface and the boy’s waiting father. “And the screams of that man, seeing his son … I’ll never forget that,” says the miner, as successive thuds echo around the cathedral like slamming iron doors.
This is a sombre and unsettling work, but the collage of powerful dialogue and often bleakly beautiful, mesmeric music emphasises the sense of loss and the sacrifices of those who built the nation. One emerges with a deeper respect for all who spent – and even gave – their lives bringing us the black stuff.
• At St Giles’ Cripplegate, London, 24 and 25 November. Box office: 020-7638 8891. Then touring.
