Composer Angela Elizabeth Slater is well-known in the UK as the founder and director of Illuminate Women’s Music, which commissions and performs music by women all over the country. This winter, Illuminate Scotland is bringing works by Marie Dare, Hildegard von Bingen, Babara Strozzi, Emily Doolittle, and Gemma McGregor, plus new commissions by Sonia Allori, Simone Seales, Kate Sagovsky and composers in residence Ruta Vitkauskaite and Angela Elizabeth Slater to Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee, Kinlochard, and Edinburgh. All of the concerts feature Illuminate artists in residence soprano Stephanie Lamprea and cellist Jessica Kerr. Stephanie and Jessica are amazing new music performers and I am honored to have them playing a piece I’ve contributed to!
Angela and I have collaborated on a topic we both love–the legend of the selkies. The selkie is a being from Scottish and Irish folklore that can shapeshift between seal and human forms. While there are stories about love between humans and selkies (the 2014 film Song of the Sea is one example), many selkie stories—including the one we tell—focus on what happens when a man steals a selkie’s sealskin in order to trap her in bondage to him. Recent literature about selkies includes A Sweet Sting of Salt by Rose Sutherland, which I reviewed here; Seanan McGuire‘s October Daye series; and Nicole Peeler‘s Jane True series.
You can hear Angela’s and my new song, “My Skin” being workshopped on December 11, at 1 pm GMT (8 am Eastern) at https://www.youtube.com/live/Xm_J_jYfTTc?si=Ve3_-exvUywCAUC8. Here’s my text:
Where is my skin? Where does it dry and crack, you coward? I am born of the tides, seal—girl, girl—seal, seal and girl and girl-seal. I swim, I gleam beneath the auroras until the day he comes and my kin scatter, tiny suns under the water and he comes and takes my skin. I ask, I plead, I beguile in desperation as hot as a star: where is my skin? Without it, I am just half— a selkie, raw and rent down the middle. Human man, where do you hide my skin? He cuts away the finger-webs of the children that I bear, and when my sister Flora comes, he slays her at the door. But Flora’s death gives me a gift, for with her skin I make coats for my daughters— my girls, who hear me nightly ask, where is my skin?— and find it themselves in the floor of the shed— my skin, the saving of me. Tonight we escape. Kirsty as lookout, Maggie brings her gun, Grace drives. Together we go to the shore. I dress my daughters in my sister’s hide, above the moon welcomes me home to the sea. The women’s eyes suddenly rich with salt. In our dappled coats, my seal-girls, girl-seals and I slide into the water’s loving rocking, and swim and swim until we become the sun.
