'Seven Stories' Subverts The Traditional Rags-To-Riches Fairy Tale

There is a theory that every story ever told reveals one of seven themes. A bold Australian multimedia production, Seven Stories — premiering at Sydney's City Recital Hall as part of Vivid — explores that very notion from a female perspective.

Seven Stories is based on the work of seven cross-genre women composers — including former The Go-Betweens member Amanda Brown, The Clouds' co-lead vocalist Jodi Phillis and Bree van Reyk, Holly Throsby's drummer. It's performed by Sydney's experimental chamber music group Ensemble Offspring. However, the "re-imagining" also comprises narrative and visuals.

"It was tougher out there for women composers and basically nobody was going to give us this sort of gig unless we created it ourselves."

Seven Stories came out of a conversation between Brown — who's composed for screen since 2000 — and Phillis, at a Gregory Page show. Says Brown, "We had a discussion about [how] we should do something together — sometime, somehow, some way. We got some other women composers on board because we had an idea that we wanted to give women a go; that it was tougher out there for women composers and basically nobody was going to give us this sort of gig unless we created it ourselves."

Another screen composer, Kyls Burtland, proposed the production's concept — inspired by maverick journalist Christopher Booker's tome The Seven Basic Plots, which examines everything from mythology to literature to contemporary pop culture. Seven Stories' themes are the quest, overcoming darkness, rags-to-riches, the tragic fatal flaw, the comedy of errors, the journey and transformation.

With van Reyk, a member of Ensemble Offspring, it seemed "logical" to pitch Seven Stories to Claire Edwardes, the fold's Artistic Director and percussionist. "Fortuitously, it turned out that they were programming all-women composers in 2017," Brown says.

For Edwardes, the challenge was to liaise with such a large creative team while ensuring continuity. "I think the visuals [by Melbourne's Sarah-Jane Woulahan] are going to be really integral to the unity of the show," she notes. But, Brown stresses, here Ensemble Offspring's "unique combination of instruments" is key — with percussion, violin, cello, clarinet piano and soprano vocals. "So the pieces are united in the ensemble as well."

Overall, Seven Stories has a cinematic feel, says Edwardes. It has "beautiful simple songs" in addition to "instrumental, kind of epic sounding-pieces". Van Reyk presents "a hilarious slapstick piece".

Playwright Hilary Bell wrote Seven Stories's text — which, Brown suggests, centres on "feminist fairy tales". "The story that I was given was the rags-to-riches story," she says. "One of my actually most hated films is Pretty Woman, which, of course, is a modern retelling of the Cinderella myth — which is probably the most famous rags-to-riches fairytale. I really don't like that story because it's all about a princess being rescued by a man — a prince. Us modern women, we're all about creating our own destinies. So I very much wanted to shy away from that interpretation and instead go more for this idea that it's a kind of cyclical journey where the woman, in this case, creates her own fortune and success through her own hard work and talent."