A rebel with a cause: Shobana Jeyasingh on how she breathed new life into Monteverdi’s Saracen

I first bumped into Claudio Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda through the good offices of my composer friend Glyn Perrin almost 20 years ago. He sent me the music and my Indian music-trained ears found the description of the eponymous battle excitingly familiar. With no libretto to hand I had no idea what was being sung. The cut and thrust of the words and the almost palpable physical energy it produced reminded me of the jathi used in Indian classical dance, vocal syllables patterned to create rhythmic energy.

So for me dance and Monteverdi were linked from the very start – though probably not in the way