Threads of Gallipoli
An Antarctic opportunity forces me to get more creative about where and how Voices of Gallipoli can be presented.
My first instinct is ‘spoken out loud, each voice in full.’
Spoken Out Loud. I want people to hear the voices, together. It’s a profound experience for the hearers and for the speakers of the words. Reading them is good too! And I recommend it - and/but you can buy the book (I’ll drop a link below) and/but it’s a solitary, anytime experience. I want my adaptation to offer collective experiences at meaningful moments.
Each Voice In Full: An event might present 1 or 2 voices. My gut feeling was to insist that they were presented start to finish. Each takes between 10-25 minutes to speak out loud, so to hear one all the way through involves an act of endurance for speaker and audience alike - worth it, IMO, but also appropriate, given that part of the point is to commemorate, on one day a year, the endurance of the veterans.
I also feared that if it was a ‘choose your own extracts’ situation, that we might be tempted to cherry pick the passages that mean more to us today, or conform to ou…