WOVEN SONG is a collection of short chamber orchestra and song compositions, each one to celebrate a weaving of an artwork by an Australian and Torres Strait Islander visual artist. The event was to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Seymour Centre. The short works were composed by Deborah Cheetham Fraillon, a Professor of Vocal Studies at the Conservatory of Music in Sydney. The conductor was Nicolette Fraillon. Deborah sang in most of the pieces, accompanied by members of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music faculty, Opera Australia Orchestra, Friends of Ensemble Dutala and special guest artists Mindy Meng Wang on the Chinese harp and Anne Norman playing the Japanese flute, the Shakuhachi.
There are more than a dozen musicians, too many name but the stand–out performer was Soprano Izabelle Kammit who performed a duet with Deborah.
The trajectory of the work’s development is long. The Department of Foreign Affairsand Trade commissioned the Tapestry Foundation of Australia (Melbourne) to create large tapestries of the paintings of Indigenous artists Brooke Andrew, Patrick Mung Mung, Pedro Wanaeamirri and Elizabeth Marks Nakamarra and of a 1900 photograph of an indigenous warrior. The tapestries are on loan to Australia’s Embassies and High Commissions in Singapore, Paris, London, Indonesia and the Vatican.
Deborah then developed the Woven Song concept based on celebrating the tapestries, in collaboration with Nicolette Fraillon and others. WOVEN SONG was first performed in Melbourne in 2021 and is considered a work in progress. The version seen in Sydney included projected videos of Deborah explaining each of the works before each segment. This allowed time for the stagehands to reset the music stands and for Deborah to change into a different gown. A feature of the event was the four different gowns she wore, while swishing the skirts to show that she was bare-footed – a nice tribute to her heritage. The gowns were commissioned by Short Black Opera and designed by Melbourne couturier Linda Britten.
Deborah is a superb singer and was a gracious soft-spoken ‘host’ of the event. She began with an operatic version of the Acknowledgement to Country, introducing the audience to the fusion of the elite form of European culture with the traditional indigenous form of the acknowledgement.
The overall event lacked continuity. The technical mistake of using the same video twice, the misuse of an apostrophe on the screen, the constant resetting of the stage and slow changeovers gave the event a patched-together feeling. The most disappointing feature was that the tapestries were not shown in their physical setting. There was only one photo of a location, a view of the Eiffel tower from our Paris embassy. It would have been far more interesting to show how these beautiful colourful tapestries are displayed in Australia’s overseas embassies. We don’t know how large they are. We don’t know if the tapestries are in a location where the public can see them. We don’t know if they are displayed complementary to the setting. WOVEN SONG is more a celebration of the compositions than of the tapestries or of the original indigenous artists.
You can see photos of the tapestries on their setting at the Tapestry Foundation of Australia.
The concept of the ’woven’ could refer to the weaving of the threads on the loom to create the tapestries, the weaving together of instruments from Japan, China and Europe (no didgeridoo included), the weaving together of the classical European operatic form with the indigenous, or even the weaving of the gowns and the bare feet.
Whatever each audience member’s interpretation, it was a joyful if somewhat disjointed evening.
WOVEN SONG was performed for one night only on the 21st November 2025 at the York Theatre at the Seymour Centre.
https://www.tapestryfoundation.com.au/contact-us
