Prof. Julie Brown shares her experience on all-star panel titled ‘Everest and the Dancing Lamas of Tibet’
Last week, Professor Julie Brown took part in ‘Everest and the Dancing Lamas of Tibet’, an extraordinary discussion at the Royal Geographical Society chaired by BBC’s Evan Davis and involving sometime climbers and travel programme makers Sir Michael Palin and (actor) Brian Blessed. The photo is a little misleading. Evan Davis and Julie may share a joke while former Python Palin and the larger-than-life Blessed look soberly on, yet in reality the latter was as ebullient as ever… (Passing success in being heard may explain the smiles.) The event was a real change of pace for an academic.
Organised by the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery UK Trust which supports the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery in exile, the event marked 100 years since real Tibetan monks first performed monastic music and dance in Britain. In 1924 Tibetan monks appeared on a London stage within a multi-media show centering on The Epic of Everest, the film of that year’s Royal Geographical Society expedition. The Trust and monks themselves learned about their 1924 counterparts at Royal Holloway. This is because in May 2023 four Tashi Lhunpo monks (then on tour in the UK) performed at Royal Holloway as part of an event that Professor Brown organised at the Centre for Audiovisual Research. A fascinating day of cultural exchange, the event focussed on her research about the 1922 expedition film: students performed the original orchestral music for the first time since 1923, and the monks demonstrated and talked about the Tibetan ‘cham instruments on which the approximation using Western orchestral instruments was based. Subsequently the Tashi Lhunpo monks decided to make the centenary of Tibetan culture in Britain the theme of their 2024 tour.
What's next?
Professor Brown is currently finishing a book on the music and sounds of early (‘silent’) travelogue films, at the heart of which is her research into the two 1920s Everest films: Climbing Mount Everest (1922) and The Epic of Everest (1924). She reconstructed and commissioned the performance of the original musical accompaniment and other historical musical extras that appear on the BFI’s DVD/BluRay restoration of The Epic of Everest. (NB: These historical musical materials are only available as ‘extras’ on the DVD/BluRay. The streamed film is accompanied by a modern newly composed score.) She has also previously written about live atmospheric stage prologues for silent films, of which the 1924 stage appearance of the monks was an example.
