A forty-minute one-act subterranean opera
Bulelwa Velem in Between a Rock and a Hard Place: An Anatomy of a Mining Accident
PHOTO: Micke Lundström
By Philip Miller
Commissioned in 2012 by Cape Town Opera, Between a Rock and a Hard Place: An Anatomy of a Mining Accident, is an opera in development written for eight singers, a set of bell-like picks fashioned from pick axes and an instrumental ensemble of percussion, strings and brass http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z22GepebRKs. It was recently performed in Stockholm as part of the 2:30 series in collaboration with the Stockholm Opera Hogskolan (the opera school) and thereafter-premiered in Cape Town, staged in a warehouse in Epping.
The work is a meditation on the voice and sound world heard within the subterranean depths of an imaginary South African mine.
As the composer, my intention was to take the audience on a journey of descent: traveling from ground level into the deepest reaches of the earth's rock-face, into the hidden strata of South African history.
Using a 1967 miner's dictionary of Fanakalo, issued by the Transvaal Chamber of Mines, the performers declaim and sing in 'call and response' style, mining terms and phrases in Fanakalo with their primary translations from the pages of the dictionary.
For the staging of the production, a transparent screen or scrim was erected, which allowed for projection of the animated texts behind which the singers were moving, creating a sense of vertical motion; of a lift moving down into the underground.
In addition to the Fanakalo dictionary, a second archival text formed part of the libretto: A register of accidents from the mining company, Simmer and Jack Mines, which is lodged in the Cullinan Library at the University of Witwatersrand.
This meticulously written ledger records with minute detail the circumstances and 'causes' surrounding the injuries and deaths of mine workers underground in the mines between 1930 and 1936 on the Vaal Reef.
The musical language of the opera uses the voices of the singers to create the rhythms and sounds of the miners' tools: shovels, drills, pick axes, explosives, and heavy machinery turn underground life into a cacophony of intense noise. (Most miners return home from the mines with hearing loss and tinnitus from the deafening sounds underground.)
The singers on stage played a specially devised 'sound-sculpture' built by the sculptor and engineer Mark O'Donovan. This instrument is made up of a series of mining picks individually tuned to distinct musical notes.
At different moments during the musical journey, the imaginary cage of miners in the lift shaft stops at various levels underground. These moments shift the musical and dramatic structure to a different, more intimate, but claustrophobic series of spaces: the rock face, the stope, and the tunnels underground. By focusing on some of the individual stories of the accidents listed in the ledger, the sung texts bring to life the bureaucratic written accounts and lists of statistics contained within the ledger.
The maintaining of written statistical documentation, like the Simmer and Jack ledger, recalls the obsessions that drove the Fascist administration in Nazi Germany to keep written statistics of the proceedings at the extermination camps during the holocaust.
This new work, Anatomy of a Mining Accident, is a work-in-progress and received a very powerful response from both the audience in South Africa and abroad. My intention is to expand the work into a full hour. I have collected more rich archival sources for further exploration: an old manual on how to treat heat exhaustion, and a journal reporting on the dangers of dust inhalation.
When the work was performed in Cape Town, the threat of violence and striking miners had re-emerged in the mining industries, almost one year on from the killings of miners by the police at Marikana at the Lonmin Platinum Mines. These scenes broadcast by the mass media seemed to bring a seemingly concluded past, embedded or reflected in this archive, into an urgent and present vision.