The Coach With the Six Insides

Here's Jean Erdman, the choreographer and dancer, dancing the role of Biddy the Hen in The Coach With the Six Insides, her 1962 musical comic stage adaptation of Finnegans Wake.

Erdman, who died in May 2020, at the age of 104, was the wife of the mythologist Joseph Campbell, co-author of The Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.  A great dancer and choreographer, she began in 1938 as the soloist of the Martha Graham company. After forming her own company in 1944, she collaborated with John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Maya Deren. As a choreographer, she created total theatre, mixing spoken words, music, dance and visual art.  The Jean Erdman company continues today, and its website has filmed recreations of her dances.

Here she is as Medusa, from an unfinished film by Maya Deren. This reminds me of James Joyce dancing 'like a satyr on a Greek vase'.

 

An extract from The Coach With the Six Insides was filmed for television in 1964, and here it is, from YouTube, posted by Repetition compulsion. It begins with an interview, in which Erdman explains why dance and Finnegans Wake were made for each other.

'All the language is rhythmic and poetic, it has many layers of meaning....The language of movement, which can carry images quickly...doesn't bind you down to defining things.'

I love the dances, by Jean Erdman, in which she performs all the various aspects of Anna Livia Plurabelle. Her guiding belief was that 'a choreographer should create for each new dance a style of movement intrinsic to its subject'. You can see this in the different ways she dances the lively bouncing hen and Kate the weighed-down crone. The four actors speak the text extracted from various parts of the book, and also use mime. I like the way they arrive on stage, driving their coach.  

 

Joyce, who was himself a celebrated dancer, would have approved (See my post James Joyce: The Dancing Years).

 

There are similarities with Mary Manning's play and Mary Ellen Bute's film, also based on The Skeleton Key, and also creating a new plot by selecting passages from across the Wake. The main difference is that Earwicker doesn't appear in The Coach With the Six Insides – perhaps because it's all taking place inside his dreaming mind.

This is where the title comes from:
 

'You have jest (a ham) beamed listening through (a ham pig) his haulted excerpt from John Whiston’s fiveaxled production, The Coach With The Six Insides, from the Tales of Yore of the times gone by before there was a hofdking or a hoovthing or a pinginapoke in Oreland, all sould'  359.22

There's a record of the show, with Teiji Ito's wonderful music, which you can listen to on Jean Erdman's bandcamp page. Ito is better known for his scores for Maya Deren. See 'Teiji Ito on Maya Deren' on YouTube.

Campbell wrote an explanation of the story for a 1964 theatre programme (which you can download from the University of Hawaii here). Here he goes even further than The Skeleton Key in finding a daytime existence for the dreamer. So he says that The Coach With the Six Insides was 'the title of a television drama seen on the tavern bar a few hours before the dream.'

 

See my post The Dream of H.C. Earwicker? for the background to this dreamer theory, which dominated early readings of Finnegans Wake.

 

I've also found a New York Times interview with Campbell and Erdman, by David Sears, from 1982, when the piece was being revived for Joyce's centenary.
 

Campbell: 'I was working on the 'Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake' years before. And I suppose that's what got into her system. But it was her idea to make it a dance, really. It was originally going to be a solo, you know. Then she seemed to get so excited about the language and the fun of what Joyce was doing with language that she couldn't think of just having a dance. So the next step was to bring in actors.'

'But the dance was never dropped,' Miss Erdman adds. 'Originally it was the dance of Anna Livia Plurabelle. She's Finnegan's wife, but she really embodies all women of every kind. And it was going to be an evening of those images: the young girl, the daughter, the old crone, the seductive Maggies, the wife, the river and the rain, Belinda the hen. Those were the main ideas, anyway - all Anna Livia. And in each one I was searching for movement themes that would shape the body. These were abstract themes all coming together in one feminine principle, but they were also independent characters. Then I showed them to Teiji Ito, our composer, and he decided on what wonderful sounds to use -such instruments as Japanese flutes, bells, shells, marimbala, accordion and violin.'

From adding music and dialogue, characters and mime passages, the 'Coach' turned into a series of vignettes through which the dance sequences were strung like Joyce's 'perils before swain.'
 

'Anna Livia is the River Liffey,' explains Mr. Campbell. 'When you're south of Dublin, it starts out like a little dancing girl. Then it flows north a little bit and starts turning eastwards, running through the suburbs of the city. She's now a mother of a family near Phoenix Park. When it turns and goes through the city, it sweeps off all of the filth like a scrubwoman taking it out to the sea. The River Liffey is all of those stages at once, all of the time, so that when she's a little girl she's also the old woman. And when she's the old woman the dancing girl is still there.'

'And that's why I wanted to dance her,' adds Miss Erdman. 'Joyce makes that river his female principle. She activates the book, urges her hero-husband on to greater deeds, tempts him to do too much and then fall. She puts him together again, like Humpty Dumpty, and starts him out. And when she dies, she just flows out into the ocean and up into the rainfall.'

Rising and falling, crucifixion and ascension, motifs occuring throughout the mythologies of the world, have here been translated in dance terms through Mr. Campbell's guidance.

'All dance is based on the truths of gravity, so we have to recognize a world dance from that point of view,' his wife continues. 'In East Indian dance, the body stands on the ground, articulating with the arms around a center. But it's not asking to conquer gravity at all. This is in direct opposition to European dance, which has an entirely different mythology. There you find the impulse to jump, the rebound, the constant yearning toward an infinite point. It is a relationship to an outside deity, not from within.'

'That's where Joyce comes in,' says Mr. Campbell, developing her theme. 'He accepts man in all his nastiness, brutality and everything. He takes you into the abyssal nightmare of time in the 'Wake,' only to show you mercy afterwards. And that saves mankind. It's the resurrection, or if you wish, reincarnation. Romans, Chapter 11, Verse 32, you know, and that's a number occurring throughout the book over and over again - 1132.
 

'And at the end the river meets the ocean to come back as the rain,' his wife exclaims. 'The old crone is so wonderful to dance, because she's so full of her weight. But then she becomes possessed with the spirit of this whole thing, that crazy 'I'm out on the town now' kind of thing! And she's suddenly doing wild jigs. She becomes a totally different person.

''You know I have to laugh when I think it's really the people who don't know the book at all, or the language or anything like that, who usually end up having the most fun with this show.' Miss Erdman says. 'They don't feel responsibility for understanding it, so they are then free to totally understand.'
 

'I think you're right there, Jean,' Mr. Campbell admits. 'But we're all like that, really, because you can't get to the bottom of Joyce after all. You just have to have fun with him and float along with that wonderful river.'

'In that wonderful 'Coach,' ' she adds, with a wink and a knowing smile.

 

 

 
 

Happy New Year Wakeans!

Lucia's Chapters of Coming Forth By Day

'Bad news, I'm dead!', says Lucia Joyce (Maria Tucci) in the opening scene of  'Lucia's Chapter's of Coming Forth by Day'. This latest Wake inspired play, by the New York theatre company, Mabou Mines, has been brought to my home town as part of this year's Brighton Festival. I went to see it at the Theatre Royal on Thursday.

It's written and directed by Sharon Fogarty who, like Olwen Fouéré in her play riverrun, has been inspired by the parallels between Finnegans Wake and the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The original title of this guidebook to the afterlife was 'Chapters of Coming Forth by Day'. The Egyptians saw death as the beginning of a long journey through a dark and dangerous underworld, which would end with them 'coming forth by day' into a new life. Joyce associated this with what happens to us every night when we sleep, and so Finnegans Wake, a night book, is full of echoes of the Book of the Dead.

The play places Lucia in the afterlife, with her own personal Book of the Dead. But she's also metaphorically dead because she's spent almost fifty years in mental institutions. There's a strong sense of entrapment. She's unable to escape from the institution and from the shadow of her famous father, James Joyce (Paul Kandel), who appears for most of the play in silhouette behind a screen. The men she falls in love with, such as Samuel Beckett, are more interested in her father than in her. She is frustrated in love and in her attempts to express herself as an artist. 

Lucia was silenced in life and even after death, when her nephew destroyed all her letters. So the play, like Carol Loeb Schloss's biography, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, is an attempt to give her back her voice.
 
There's wonderfully atmospheric music and sound from Carter Burwell, who scores the Coen Brothers' films, and dynamic visual projections on multiple screens by Julie Archer. At one point Lucia is completely engulfed in projected text. Jim Clayburg has designed the set with a cantilevered chair, on which Lucia sometimes takes off, swooping through the air.

The play was originally created as a collaboration with the late Ruth Maleczech, who, according to Fogarty, was 'a fierce and defiant Lucia with a Vesuvian anger simmering away.' You can see from the trailer on Vimeo that she was also very funny. Maria Tucci gives us a more fragile and child-like Lucia.

The text includes quotations from the Wake, reflecting Lucia's state of mind. At one point, the whole stage is lit up by flashes of lightning and, in a rage, Lucia shouts out the mighty thunderword from the book's opening page:

'bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!'

Maria Tucci and Paul Kandel as Lucia and James Joyce, from the theatre programme

In my favourite part of the play, Joyce comes out from behind the screen, to deliver to his daughter the lovely lyrical passage in which Nuvoletta, the cloud girl, falls to earth as a drop of rain:

'Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. And into the river that had been a stream (for a thousand of tears had gone eon her and come on her and she was stout and struck on dancing and her muddied name was Missisliffi) there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears (I mean for those crylove fables fans who are ‘keen’ on the prettypretty commonface sort of thing you meet by hopeharrods) for it was a leaptear. But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh! I’se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!' 

The last line here is spoken by Lucia.

This feels like a description of Lucia, with 'all her myriads of drifting minds'. But, although she was a model for Nuvoletta, Joyce wrote this passage in 1927, three years before his daughter became ill. Joyce believed that Finnegans Wake had the power to predict the future. Had he predicted Lucia's illness here? 

At the time, Lucia was 'struck on dancing'. She was making a career for herself as an avant-garde dancer in Paris. Here she is dancing at the Bullier Ball in Paris in 1929, when the audience shouted, 'Nous réclamons l'irlandaise!' (We're calling for the Irish girl!)

She's wearing a shimmering silver fish costume she made herself. 'It was in silver sequins edged with green. One leg was covered to the heel and the other came right through the costume, so that when she put one behind the other, she created the illusion of a fish tail. Green and silver were entwined in her hair.' James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, p 110.

Lucia also speaks the Wake's ending, as Anna Livia, the river Liffey, flowing out of Dublin to unite with her father, the sea.

'And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms.'

Spoken by the dead Lucia Joyce, with her father standing beside her,  this passage takes on a whole new meaning.

This was the very first time that Tucci has performed the role and the production was a little unsteady on opening night. But what a thrill to hear again the words of Finnegans Wake spoken on stage.

Andrew Kay, critic of the local listings magazine, Latest 7, wrote that it made him rush home to download the book!

The best thing I've read on Lucia is Joan Acocella's  'A Fire in the Brain: The difficulties of being James Joyce's daughter' in the 2003 New Yorker.

RTE have also made an excellent documentary about her, which you can listen to here. The radio documentary, like Carol Loeb Schloss's book and the Mabou Mines play, claims that Joyce's linguistic experiments were inspired by Lucia's fractured language. In fact, he'd been writing the Wake for seven years before she became ill. Her breakdown was one of the factors that triggered his own writing block in the 1930s when, as he wrote, 'the words came out like drops of blood.'

Olwen Fouéré's Riverrun

For Joyceans, the best thing that happened in 2012 was that the great man's works came out of copyright. For years, Joyce’s estate, run by his cantankerous grandson, Stephen, has tried hard to stop people quoting from, performing, or even reading his books in public. All this has now changed, and this year I've seen three fine stage productions of his works.

I was in Dublin at the weekend for the Theatre Festival, where Olwen Fouéré performed Riverrun at the Project Theatre. This is her adaptation of the final book of Finnegans Wake, which she acts out, through the voice of the River Liffey.

She performs on a deep wide stage, with a central microphone on a bending stand, the lead twisting away to the left rear corner of the stage. To the right of the lead, the floor is covered with salt crystals, giving the impression of the bank and river. She begins by taking off her shoes and stepping over the microphone lead onto the salt, into the water.

Fouéré then speak-sings the final chapter, from which she has cut out the dialogues and set pieces (St Kevin, Muta and Juva, St Patrick and the Druid). By removing them, using only the framing narrative and the final monologue, she creates a strong sense of a single voice in a flowing river of words. 

The central idea running though the last chapter is of waking up, after the long night of the book. 'Calling all downs. Calling all downs to dayne' - a call to everyone lying down to rise up with the day: 'Passing. One. We are passing. Two. From sleep we are passing. Three. Into the wikeawades warld from sleep we are passing. Four. Come, hours, be ours!'

The sense becomes clearer when we reach the final monologue, the only part of the book actually spoken by the river, Anna Liffey, as she flows out of Dublin to die in the Irish Sea.

The Liffey from Sean Heuston Bridge

As she speaks these words, Fouéré moves rhythmically, rolling her shoulders as if she is swimming. The movements grow bigger as she gets nearer the choppy waters of Dublin Bay. The watery sense is strengthened by Stephen Dodd's lighting and Almer Kellaher's soundscape, which builds throughout the monologue.

The first part is spoken to her husband, who is the fallen giant Finnegan and the city of Dublin stretched out beside her: 'Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long!' She calls on him to dress, and to join her. But he never replies. She's aware that she's being replaced in the water cycle by a younger river, 'a daughterwife from the hills...Swimming in my hindmoist.' This reminds her of her own youth when she fell, as rain, out of her mother, the sky:

The younger river, upstream at Chapelizod

'Now a younger's there.Try not to part! Be happy, dear ones! May I be wrong! For she'll be sweet for you as I was sweet when I came down out of me mother.  My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud. In peace and silence. I could have stayed up there for always only. It's something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes. Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come.'

At the end, as the Liffey approaches the vast sea she grows disillusioned with her husband, the city (' I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You're but a puny.'). Flowing into the sea is a death for the river, and a return to her father, the cold sea:
 

Looking upstream from the O'Connell Bridge

'I am passing out. O bitter ending! And it's old and old it's sad and old it's sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms....A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the' 

With the final 'the' Fouéré's face freezes in the light, suspended like the sentence, which will continue on the book's opening page ('riverrun past Eve and Adam's...') Finnegans Wake never ends.

Riverrun is an astonishing achievement, and it was wonderful to see it a stone's throw from

Olwen Fouéré by the Liffey after the show

the Liffey. It was the right time of year too, Autumn, when the Liffey is carrying leaves down to the sea ('I am leafy speafing').  The leaves are the pages of the book, which drift away one by one, until, on the last page Anna Livia says, 'My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still.'

After the show, we went down to the Liffey and joined Olwen for drinks on the Millennium Bridge. I asked her how difficult it was to learn the text. She said, 'I found I just knew it!'

Then we finished the evening in the Oval (where Simon Dedalus drinks with his cronies in Ulysses) before heading back to Wynn's Hotel (which gets two mentions in Ulysses and three in Finnegans Wake).

Joycean Heaven!

In 2022, Olwen recorded the closing pages with her long-term musical collaborator, Roger Doyle, 'the godfather of Irish electronic music' (Donal Fallon)