Output details

Pwy Yw T.H.? : A 12 screen simultaneous video installation involving a choir of voices reciting the poems of T.H. together with contributors recalling their personal senses of significance of the poems. It takes an experimental look at the relationship between TV documentary and literature and seeks to deconstruct the orthodox linear narrative forms deployed by TV arts documentaries.

Exhibition- cinematography, editing and curation by Sills-Jones

Status: in public domain on 15-17 December 2010, Aberystwyth (Officer’s Club)

Research questions:

1.In what ways can the disciplinary backgrounds of literary studies and screen practice-as-research be brought to bear on the significance of T.H. Parry-Williams' 'literary corpus' to his contemporary audience?

2.How does Wales, thirty five years after the death of Parry-Williams, assimilate him into the national narrative in a post-assembly, post-Christian and post-post-modern era?

3.How might his poems be imagined and visualised?

Context: During the twentieth century the essays and poetry of TH Parry-Williams (1887 - 1975) were an integral part of the literary canon. He is generally considered to be the father of Modernism and what Saunders Lewis terms ‘poesie cebrale’ in Welsh.

Significant features of process: In two centres which have a particular association with Parry-Williams (The National Library of Wales and the National Eisteddfod Maes), his readers are invited to perform one poem of their choice from his work and talk of its significance. These readings and interviews are then 'composed' into a 'chorus' of readings played polyphonically on 12 different screens simultaneously, drawing on the formal work of Jane Cardiff's '40 Part Motet' (2001), Juan Downey's 'Videos Trans Americas' (1971-77) and Ben Rubin's 'Listening Post' (2010).

The aim here is to create an object that embodies the discursive corpus of T.H Parry-Williams in the speech acts of its contemporary audience, drawing on Jean Rouch's notions of the performative and experimental method of documentary representation, on Eisler's notion of communicative communities, and Nelson's notion of the similarity between practice-as-research and 'collage'.

On reflection, the exhibition constituted a joint focus for researchers, coming from very different disciplinary perspectives, to advance discussion of the research questions identified above. Some deductions are recorded in the accompanying article published in Gwerddon.

This 12 screen simultaneous video installation was shown in Aberystwyth in December 2012. It involves a choir of voices reciting the poems of T.H. together with contributors recalling their personal senses of significance of the poems, in the National Library and on the National Eisteddfod field. This collaboration between Robin Chapman (of Aberystwyth University Department of Welsh) and Dafydd Sills-Jones was a conscious endeavour to identify and present a contemporary ‘literary corpus’ of T.H. Parry-Williams, inspired by notion of reading communities and by Auden’s poem on the cultural demise of W.B. Yeats.