Movement of a passionate people – the story in music by Billy Kennedy

A highly colourful stage show centred on the story of the 18th century Presbyterian emigration from Ulster is expected to get its world premiere in Belfast next spring.

On Eagle’s Wing, a two-and-a-half hour spectacular written by leading Northern Ireland composer and musician John Anderson, is a presentation which tells the absorbing story of a passionate people – the Ulster-Scots or the Scots-Irish (Scotch-Irish), as they are known in America.

The 10,000-seater Odyssey Arena at Laganside in Belfast is ideally to be the setting for the show’s premiere and hopes are that the show will eventually move to other regions of the United Kingdom, and to major cities in the United States and Canada.

The show has a cast of 300, consisting of singers, dancers, instrumentalists and massed choirs who give real effect to the presentation.

It’s a joyous stage presentation, a musical, a dance show, an oratorio, a concert – a real spectacular to mark the history of the Ulster-Scots over 500 years and a celebration of a people who gave America 17 of its 43 Presidents.

World-renowned Ulster-born singer Peter Corry is narrator, who commands the stage and leads the cast in this fast-moving story of emigration, separation, love and loyalty.  Peter plays the part of a father, and of a son.  At times, he becomes the lover, the husband the cleric, the shipping agent and the American President Andrew Jackson, whose parents moved to America from Carrickfergus, Co Antrim in 1765, just 18 months before Andrew was born in the Carolinas.

Narrator Corry is supported by a cast of one female lead and four actors (who also have singing parts!),  several choirs, bands, pipes, fifes, drums (Lambegs and bodhrans), traditional instruments and orchestra, with 30 professional dancers.

With real feeling and a true sense of identity, Peter tells the story of the Ulster-Scots (Scots-Irish) through the eyes of individuals from their particular point in history. 

John Anderson confirms that with al original music and dance, the style draws on the traditional influences of 500 years in Ulster, England, Scotland and America.

“The show is both innovative and spectacular in its presentation, and with the setting shaped in both the past and the present.  The theses are timeless and universal.  There are two sides to the story: the Scots who came to Ulster from the 1500s onwards and then emigrated again, further afield.  And the Scots who stayed in Ulster.

“Through the original words, music and dance, the show sets the lives of individuals against the monumental backdrop of this wonderful story.  The settings are Scotland, Ulster and America throughout history from the 16th century, finishing with a celebration of all three, in the present day,” explains John Anderson.

On Eagle’s Wing is an idea that John Anderson, for many years producer-director for Ulster Television and the BBC, has been working on the show for some considerable time.

“I have written the show with two main elements running alongside each other, each in many ways dependent on each other.”

“The first is a large-scale live public performance presented in an original abstract musical, dance and theatrical context.  This allows the material to connect with a live audience, for the emotions to be heightened in a way that is extremely difficult to achieve in a studio recording.

“Secondly, the live concert underpins and forms the structure of the television programme, to which are added the creative resources and the artistic manipulation of material offered by film, television, photography, sound effects, words and music.

“There are visual and sound techniques that are extremely difficult, if not impossible to achieve in a live concert.  By combining the energy and excitement of live performance with the finesse and scope of imaginative television it is hoped to do more than just tell the story,” says John Anderson.

He believes that by giving voice to what he perceives to be the feelings, as well as the story, of the Ulster-Scots, there will be an understanding of an ethnic group on issues like emigration, separation, roots, language, deprivation, loyalty, struggle, and the adherence (or otherwise!) to a faith.