MIWA NAGATO-APTHORP

Alchemy Film & Arts

Using film as a way to come together, have conversations and strengthen community.

MIWA NAGATO-APTHORP

Miwa Nagato-Apthorp began a practice-led research project as musician in residence with Alchemy Film & Arts in 2022.

Working with communities and historians, Miwa established a singing group, which still meets independently, and has explored the agricultural histories of Hawick and the Scottish Borders, resulting in a song exploring and speculating on the experiences of the bondagers – women engaged by tenant farmers (hinds) to do agricultural labour for a landowner during the nineteenth century.

The resulting song, ‘The Bonded One’, is a significant contribution to an under-researched area of Scottish Borders history. Miwa has also written ‘Hawthown’, after the bush from which Hawick reportedly took its name.

Miwa performed these newly commissioned songs at the thirteenth edition of Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, and at Edinburgh International Film Festival, in 2023.

Intersecting with Alchemy’s overarching project Hawick in Common (2023-25), she has been collaborating with communities on the creation of new Hawick-inspired songs.

THE BONDED ONE

Fri Dawn til dusk a’ season
I reap and thrash and dig,
And still the hind complains
that my appetite’s too big

Six months the hinds will hire us,
then the farmer pays him back
For everyday we’re workin
in our black straw mushroom hat

And it’s down wi auld bondage
Down! Cries he
But he’s no the bonded one
The bonded one is me

Morning brings the cow horn
and dawns the working day
And like a fleet of wagons,
we proceed along our way

Folk gathering in Yetholm
watch the crowning of King fa’
And ower in Hawick revolters
drive the cavalry awa

And it’s down wi auld bondage
Down! Cries he
But he’s no the bonded one
The bonded one is me

We’re singling in the summer
First woman leads the line
And she’ll hoe a few for you
my dear
If you ever fall behind

In autumn comes the harvest,
Beneath the glowing moon,
My legs were set for caving
Till the fiddler played a tune

And it’s down wi auld bondage
Down! Cries he
But he’s no the bonded one
The bonded one is me

They’re asking of the bondage
Now all this time has passed,
I’d have surely told them,
If they’d ever cared to ask

It was down wi auld bondage
Down! Cried he
But he was no the bonded one
The bonded one was me

HAWTHORN

Many the bonnie children have come
Many the bonnie children said she
They come to gather flowers
In the evening hours
And for shade on a warm summer’s day.

Many the mournful, mournful ones have come
Many the mournful, mournful ones said she
They’re telling tales of loss
And though they know love’s cost
They’re happy just to have a place to cry.

Many the cruel hearted ones have come
Many the cruel hearted ones said she
They come with a wicked plan
To cut me where I stand
And they never will be seen from again.

LULLABY OF TAKEDA

‘Lullaby of Takeda’, performed here with Haru Nagato-Apthorp, is a Japanese folk song from the perspective of a young girl taken from her home to live with a wealthy family and look after their baby.

In the song, the girl laments that she cannot celebrate the Bon festival and that the child won’t stop crying, and yearns to return over the mountain to her home.

The song has been sung in the areas of Kyoto and Osaka over many years. It was adopted as an anthem of resistance and as a result was banned from some major TV networks in Japan until the 1990s.