Making ‘Modern Fairies’: Making Fairies Modern

Abstract

An AHRC-funded project 'Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies' investigated what happened when a number of artists (musicians, writers, filmmakers) were asked to respond to and remediate a curated selection of traditional stories about fairies and loathly ladies. The artists came to the project with a spectrum of different views about fairies, ranging from belief in their existence to absolute scepticism about the supernatural. The works-in-progress they created were performed in a series of experimental shows at The Sage Gateshead theatre in 2019. The artists took up certain themes such as the otherworld, time slippage, fairies and children, but were not attracted by others. Fairy material was reconfigured to reflect contemporary concerns about the natural world and to explore ways in which magical humananimal transformation spoke to women's experience. they must work on the topics and with the motifs that writers, artists, and musicians have chosen to deploy (see Hutton 2019 for an exemplary study of the history and treatment of the Wild Hunt). But what might happen if academics could choose a particular subset of folk stories and commission artists to respond to them across a range of media? This was the starting point of the research project 'Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies', which ran from March 2018 to September 2019. It was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and undertaken by Fay Hield (Principal Investigator [PI]), Carolyne Larrington (Co-Investigator [CoI]), and Steven Hadley (Research Assistant). 1New creative work made in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has frequently incorporated elements of traditional British folklore, very often in pursuit of projects of (re-)enchantment as conjured up by Richard Jenkins above. This kind of appropriation has occurred across different artistic media, whether film or television in the distinctive 'folkhorror' movement of the 1970s (see, among others, Rodgers 2019; Scovell 2017) or literary fiction for children (for example, Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath, and Elidor), for young adults (as in Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock), or adult short stories and novels (notably Sylvia Townsend Warner's Kingdoms of Elfin and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell). As in literature, so too in folk music: singers and musicians have composed new works drawing their inspiration from the narratives and motifs of the British folktale tradition. While published works are relatively few (see, for example, Julie Fowlis's 'Selkie-Boy' and Gavin Davenport and Jess Arrowsmith's 'Changeling's Lullaby'), there are also a number of amateur singers composing and performing original works of this kind at folk clubs around the country. 2 Interest in and enthusiasm for folklore-influenced tradition has become a key element within the creative vision of a good number of contemporary artists: writers, musicians and filmmakers.The project was initially conceived as involving musical performers with experience of working with ...

Towards practice research in ethnomusicology

“…She raises very important questions about intercultural aesthetics which are currently unaddressed in the largely Western-centric debate about 'artistic research', which is dominated by art music and musicians. Her work, and that of others including Fay Hield's work on the Modern Fairies project at the University of Sheffield, in particular, raises some very significant problems about how involved other collaborating performers can be, or are in producing the research insights, as opposed to simply participating in professional performance ensembles (Larrington and Hield 2021). 1 This is an important aspect of practice research, in the sense that as a field of research it may well include artists who are not 'researchers' but who can contribute to the production of research through the production of new knowledge translated and communicated for those beyond the community of practice.…”