Winter 2023

Left: Cover of Vernon Lee’s
The Ballet of The Nations.
1915 edition, from the library of
Il Palmerino Cultural Association.
Above: Constance Smedley,
undated.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Right: The Ballet of The Nations
performed at Il Palmerino Cultural
Association, 2019.
Source: Il Palmerino Archive
figures, but she was not in favour of votes for
women, although she does concede that “mothers
would make good members of Parliament”.
Tell us about a highlight from ‘Scoring
Suffrage’ that combines spoken word and
music.
In the performance, we explore the figure of
the wanderer, the gypsy. So, we looked at the
archetypal artist, the wandering minstrel – a
figure of freedom and free movement - in a
few different works of poetry and music. As a
complement to Maurice Ravel’s ‘Tzigane’, I read
Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s ‘Our Sweet
Companions – Sharing Your Bunk and Your
Bed’. She was an exile, and suffered greatly in
early twentieth-century Russia, and was deeply
influenced by Pushkin’s narrative poem ‘The
Gypsy’.
Another piece I’d like to include in the future,
on this same theme, is The Minstrel, which
Constance Smedley collaborated on, in 1915,
with her husband Maxwell Armfield. It features
a wandering musician, in a country destroyed
by war. Both Smedley and Armfield were
committed pacifists, and in that same period,
they set up experimental theatre companies
in London, providing body-movement scripts.
They had a vision of really strict choreography
in their productions, for which Smedley
provides drawings, envisioning them as a
rhythmic structure.
16 Restoration Conversations • Winter 2023