In January 2018 the composer, performer and theatre director Laura Bowler boarded the square-rigged barque Europa, to make the treacherous eight-day crossing over the Drake Passage from Ushuaia, Argentina to the Antarctic Peninsula. As a temporary crew member, she shared duties on watch with the full-time crew, climbing rigging, spotting icebergs and helming the 131-foot sailing ship. It was exhausting and sometimes frightening work, punctuated with bouts of seasickness: ‘I will never forget leaning over the side’, she has said, ‘while simultaneously trying to keep us on course at the held in pitch-black darkness with sideways rain and the fear that the ship might capsize at any moment.’
Bowler was putting herself through all this as research for her music theatre piece Antarctica (2019). It is a mark of who she is an artist, and of the visceral, sensory overload of her work, that her response to what she calls ‘one of the most exciting and awful moments of my life’ was immediately to ask: ‘How could it not become part of my piece?’ Originally conceived as a response to climate change and environmental destruction (and with Bowler in one section denouncing fracking while personifying a choking planet, it is certainly still that), Antarctica became as much about the journey as it was about the equally extraordinary environment at the end. And so, amidst the evocations of sea and birdlife, the silent landscape and the cracking of ice, Bowler folds in voice notes about the life-threatening dangers of climbing the ship’s rigging, alongside sea shanties and evocations of the roiling ocean.
Not many artists would go to quite such lengths just for the sake of research. But for Bowler, who is often the central performer in her own music, it is essential that she not only knows her subject on an intellectual level but can also embody it fully in the moment of performance. In this respect, she is a student of Antonin Artaud’s ‘theatre of cruelty’ and Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘poor theatre’: directors who sought to strip back the surfaces of the actor’s art in order to bring them, and their audience, into direct confrontation with the emotions they were portraying. In her own work as both performer and composer, Bowler has not been shy of pushing herself and her performers to their physical and emotional limits, to often shattering effect. For FFF, co-commissioned by hcmf// in 2017, she cast herself as a physical victim of social oppression, hands pinned back and aloft or wrapped around her throat. SHOW(ti)ME, premiered in Huddersfield in 2022, stretched the pianist Zubin Kanga to exhaustion in order to reveal his vulnerabilities and anxieties. And for Jennifer Walshe’s Training is the Opposite, written for Bowler’s theatre company, Size Zero Opera, the composer trained several times a week for three months in order to learn how to box. Opening the score, which begins with three minutes of shadowboxing, she realised, with characteristic equanimity, ‘OK, I’m essentially going to have to change my entire being to be able to perform this piece’; after the premiere, she actually upped her training in order to fight her first real bout. The experience changed her subsequent performances of the piece: ‘You can’t ever have any real understanding of the level of focus required in the ring until you’ve done it.’
For Huddersfield this year, Bowler brings the concert-length multimedia work ADVERT, a piece that explores tribalism and self-advertisement through semi-autobiographical videos exploring mental health, appearance, gender, political affiliation, privilege and sex. Bowler herself will be centre stage, of course, as vocalist and performer, alongside Germany’s Decoder Ensemble, and – in possibly a first for contemporary music – the tattoo artist Julia Rehme. Whatever happens, no one will leave unchanged.
Profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson
The 46th edition of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, hcmf// 2023, takes place Friday 17 – Sunday 26 November 2023. Tickets for ADVERT are on sale now.