“Part of the license of anachronism is a permission to fold one thing into another.”
— Karinne Keithley Syers

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Recently, Karinne Keithley Syers, Alaina Ferris and I met over zoom to chat about their shimmering new oratorio, The Lydian Gale Parr, which is produced by the Tank and Amanda + James, and plays at Target Margin Apr 5-20. 

With a libretto by Karinne and music by Alaina, this tender-sweeping, intimate-spectacular chamber oratorio tells the story of a child emissary sent from a city under siege to deliver a letter to the attacking general asking for an end to war. As the emissary fruitlessly pursues the general, they travel through space and time, passing freely from city to city and gender to gender during their unending errand.

I began reading Karinne’s plays (and the work of her peers, whose work she published) when I was a very young writer living in the middle of nowhere, and it is no exaggeration to say that Karinne’s sentences—with their intricately flickering, unfolding beauty, and their trenchant, coiling wit—led me to New York, which I think of as my artistic home, though I am often outside it. And whenever I publish a play through 53rd State Press (the torch of which KK(S) passed to me, KK, in 2017), I think of it as a kind of letter I am helping to carry across space and time, a letter whose impact I can never predict, whose powers I may not wholly understand.

In The Lydian Gale Parr, the delicate rigor of Karinne’s ear is brought to air by Alaina Ferris’s compositional genius. Alaina’s music is beautifully attentive to the complex tones of Karinne’s text, picking up and elaborating its slippery, iterating metaphors. Alaina takes what on the page might feel private or inward-facing (“I will yet shine privately” is a phrase from one of Karinne’s earlier plays that sometimes wallpapers my psyche) and gives it a choral—which is to say communal—life. The Lydian Gale Parr—which is directed by Meghan Finn, with choreography by Katy Pyle—is performed by almost an entire city: Gelsey Bell (soprano, Celtic harp), Lacy Rose (soprano), Alaina Ferris (alto, piano, Celtic harp), Aviva Jaye (alto, Celtic harp), and Chad Goodridge (baritone) with Yoshi Weinberg (flute, clarinet, pedal harp), Eamon Goodman (flute, bass clarinet, steel guitar), Leah Shaw (bassoon), Alina Eckersley (French horn), Charlie Reed (viola da gamba) along with dancers Jay Beardsley, Cove Barton, Arzu Salman, and MJ Markovitz.

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Kate Kremer: One of my questions is about the logistics of the collaboration, which is a question I want to extend backward to how you two composed and wrote the oratorio, but which is also about how you rehearse a thing that has this many voices and bodies—how do you do it logistically, in a room? 

Karinne Keithley Syers: Can I answer this from the standpoint of how it is rehearsed so differently from anything else that I’ve done? We’re situating this performance in theater, because theater encompasses everything. But the medium of this performance is really music embodied in space. It doesn’t operate like a play or an opera. One of the reasons why we call it an oratorio instead of an opera or a chamber opera is that it’s not dramatic, and it doesn’t enact itself as a story. The way that the performers manifest the piece is to sing it, not to act it. So the rehearsal work around staging only begins when we move into the theater, with the exception of the dances, which occupy two discrete portions of the piece, and have been built in advance. So to your question of logistics, the preparation has been almost entirely focused on the music, which we’ve been developing since like…we first talked in October 2017. 

Alaina Ferris: I looked at it last night. October 29 is when you sent me the libretto. 

KKS: Yeah, cuz there was a Halloween fundraiser for Clubbed Thumb at Scott [Adkins] & Erin [Courtney]’s. We knew of each other and had seen each other’s work. But we both performed together in little locations inside Scott and Erin’s house. And we ended up smoking a cigarette on the stoop. And I was just like, I’m making my move (stretching arm out as if around AF’s shoulder)—

AF: I was like, “Whoa, bold moves.” 

KKS: Alaina has been building the music with a core group of singers who have been with the piece through a series of New Dramatists workshops since early 2018. And then starting this past summer, we began to gather the fuller apparatus of the performance event. In August, Katy [Pyle] started working with their company Ballez on the dances. We had a few different weeks of rehearsal to bring musicians and dancers together. Meghan [Finn], who’s directing the piece, really begins her process substantively when we move into the theater for our tech residency. The manifestation instinct of the piece is very sculptural, so it doesn’t need to be staged. The experiment of staging is a smaller portion of its being than its voicing. And then the space that’s cleared for these dances. The staging is a kind of spectacular surround: projections, a tent, costuming—all these visual elements—but in a way it’s more like a fashion show. It’s not a fashion show, but it has that sense of “we’re gonna build quickly into the space and show up there.” But the body of the thing is the singing of it. And that’s where all the deep work has been concentrated, in Alaina building the music and then being with our collaborators in the room and responding to that—that’s the active accordion of where the process is. And the libretto was already completed—I edited it as we workshopped, but it was basically finished before I ever gave it to Alaina. 

KK: Wow. Okay, that’s—

KKS: It was a prior process. 

KK: I have a question about composing, which is, to what degree you feel like there is a particular melody ingrained in the language that you receive? Like when I look at a sentence, the grammar of the sentence tells me things about how the sentence should be spoken. And I’m wondering, Alaina, if that’s an experience you have when you look at a text, if there’s a phrase of music that feels correct?

AF: I’ve been asked to answer this question so many times in different ways. Essentially, what is the relationship between text and music? And how do you compose text? Does it change, does the text become something else when you set it to music? And the answer is: yes. Music without text is not the same as music with text. It’s a conversation where the two aspects (music and text) create something new altogether. So, when I look at the words on the page, I don’t believe that they have a preordained melody to them. The words on the page exist in their own format and they have their own beauty in that format. Reading the text out loud from the script is an entirely different and discrete experience, and it has its own texture and feeling. Then setting it to music is yet another aspect of the language’s potential identity. Initially, Karinne only wanted to explore having the final part five of the oratorio sung. And then after that workshop, we sidebarred, and Karinne was like, “The whole thing needs to be sung, doesn’t it?” And I said, “Yes, definitely.”

KKS: Yeah, I initially thought the shape of it was something that hovered at the edge between speech and incantation and then between incantation and song and that it just like (makes a sloping shape with her arms) lifted into its full song. That was my initial idea of how the text worked. But as we worked, it became clear that the speaking place was actually in the middle of the oratorio, Part III. And otherwise it wanted to be sung throughout. 

AF: But that conceit informed the way that the music ended up being composed. Because there are a lot of sung sections where it is very static in the melodic line, recitative in format. The opening sections of the oratorio are these pairs of emissaries singing to one another. And that sung-spoken-Robert Ashley-esque modality, to me, evokes people speaking to each other through old radios in wartime, trying to communicate; or two versions of the same person at different points in time saying the same thing but at slightly different frequencies because they’re on slightly different timelines. And so they’re speaking on static lines, but the static lines’ slight offset creates a subtle harmony; or maybe they’re in unison and then they go into harmony as their timelines diverge. To answer your question: how I set Karinne’s text is I embody it, I just say it until it’s in my bones. I love saying it out loud, again and again and again, and then feeling the rhythm of it on the tongue. And then that rhythm is the easiest starting point, from it, I identify a feeling or an image and naturally settle into it. And then I’ll decide—if I don’t hear a melody, I’ll decide on a texture and how that texture supports the feeling or emotion in me. And build it out slowly from there. So it feels very architectural, like, here’s the line, here’s the plan and elevation, and then I’m going to slowly fill in the colors, details, and ornaments.

KK: And then maybe this is a moment to return to…did you call it a spatial instrument? 

AF: I called it a spatial instrument. (Laughter.) I have to show you, first. There’s this page in the libretto—

KK: Oh, yeah. The page of—

AF: This page (laughter). Oh, yeah. (shows the page in the libretto).So I was always so curious about what this page meant, or how it could be interpreted musically, because it feels very musical—it feels like a graphic score, or it feels like an event. It also reminds me of Native American event poems. At first when I was looking at it, I thought this was a sort of flattened top-down 2D representation of physical things that we could put on a 2D space, a ground plan. I was like, “Oh, these are little trash heaps on the floor. And here’s like a big central trash heap and there’s some detritus over here and over here.” So I’m thinking about emissaries in wartime, thinking about using these trash heaps as found percussion that we as performers could play. And about this time I went to go see Eamon Goodman’s master’s thesis at NYU’s ITP program. Eamon is a long-time collaborator of mine, we’ve worked a lot together with César Alvarez, various freelance projects, and Eamon’s been involved with The Lydian Gale Parr from the get-go. At ITP, Eamon’s research focused on spatial sound, and for his thesis he created a hanging instrument called Sound Suspension No. 2. And I was excited and curious! I walked into his thesis presentation, I saw bells hanging at different levels (I have a bell fetish, so I kind of freaked out), and you can hold up an iPad and with augmented reality feature, point the iPad at the bells and play them. So it’s both analog and digital. And I was like, OMG! My idea for Karinne’s page doesn’t need to be a flattened 2D representation of 2D space: it’s a flattened image of a 3D installation. Eamon and I went out for coffee, and I said “Eamon, can you build us a 3.0?” And he was like, “All my dreams are coming true,” and I was like, “Mine too!” Then Eamon yes-anded by saying, “By the way, I found this vibraphone on the street that I want to take apart.” So then we deconstructed the vibraphone. But before we deconstructed it, I took sound samples of each of the individual tines so I could have those sounds in my computer and play with them in my compositional process, while Eamon built the instrument. Then Eamon hung the tines from fishing wire, suspended on little pieces he built at his father’s workshop, then suspended tiny hammers solenoid above them. So the tines are somewhat floating space, but they’re wired to a central system. When you come see the show, you’ll see all their wires gathering up into the center of our tent. So we can play the hanging instrument as its own instrument, and it’s both analogue and digital. Meanwhile, I had found this gestural device called a Mugic (like magic+music). It was designed by a violinist named Mari Kimura who wanted to be able to put a device on her hand while she was bowing her violin and cue electronic tracks simultaneously. The device captures movement data, so we thought: what if we put this on the dancers’ or performers’ hands, rendering movement as part of the orchestra. So we took this Mugic, Eamon programmed it a little bit, we put it on the dancers’ hands, and somebody does this (flips her hand in the air) all of the vibraphone tines ring.

KK: (Laughter, incredulity) That’s so cool!

KKS: And they light up.

AF: And they light up.

KK: Oh my God. That’s amazing. 

AF: And amazingly, Karinne and I, in a sort of kismet situation, went to go see Adrienne Westwood and Angélica Negrón’s piece [ ] at Barnard College’s Movement Lab. And it also has a hanging instrument, though it’s different in its mechanics, involving touch rather than gesture. We reached out to Barnard and asked if they had a residency opportunity, and they were like, yes. So suddenly, Eamon and I had the space to build and develop the instrument, which allowed us to realize our vision. And the theme of our Barnard residency fit within their general departmental research, which is “environmental intelligence.” And it’s wonderful because basically, we’re taking trash, something that’s been thrown away, but then in being thrown away or discarded, it’s reinvented and has new utility and purpose. Somebody meant to get rid of this vibraphone. Now the vibraphone still exists, but in a different form, a sort of…resurrection. I want a different word. Reincarnation? 

KKS: I’ve been thinking a lot about the word “iteration.” Like I was looking back at old drafts of the script and the process of taking something and then replaying it, but allowing it to shapeshift as it does, so that there are things that recur, new things that appear, and things that morph. And this idea of iteration feels… like, this is an iteration of a vibraphone. It’s not a close iteration of its original form, but it’s an iteration of a vibraphone. And that feeling of trying to dig back into a thing and divine another structure or another figure inside of it feels very relevant to both how I wrote the libretto and also how the text functions in the relationship of the letters to the narrative that is drawn from that section.

KK: And the way the original or intended message gets rerouted or reiterated.

KKS: Also that sense of like, surround, like taking something and creating a surround out of it. So it’s no longer an instrument you know, knitted into itself. It becomes environmental—it becomes something you can be inside of, and that plays around you.

KK: So this maybe gets at a question I have for you, Karinne, which has to do with the image of the walled city. I’m thinking of the role of walls in so many of your earlier plays—like The Goldfinch Wall in Montgomery Park, and the Cosmoplane Wall in ASTRS. And even, in Another Tree Dance, the wall that slides are being projected on. The presence of the wall as a speaking meaning figure in your work. And I’m also thinking about the walled city as a metaphor—an ancient metaphor—and ways that it has served as a figure for the work of art itself and the anxieties of communication that attend it, the dangers of passage, of interpretation. I wonder about the significance of the wall in your work and how it’s changed over time?

KKS: One of the childhood books that I love the most, that I think, besides The Wind in the Willows, influences my writing to this day, is The Secret Garden. And this idea of a walled garden, or like a door into an open but confined space. That is a space of freedom, but is also a space of enclosure, this kind of interior chamber. That’s very—it’s deep in my psyche. When I used to talk about The Basement Tapes of the Mole Cabal, I used to describe it as “a walled garden you could go for a 10-minute float in, and somewhere in it you would encounter a song.” A container that possesses a bloom. Also when I was a kid, we lived in England near York, which—the ancient part of York is walled, and on Sundays we would go walk on the walls of the city and like, go do brass rubbings at the York Minster, and so this idea of the remnant of a walled city was kind of a normal part of my childhood imagination. 

And then the talking walls…In Montgomery Park it was more related to this idea of the building as a body, a conscious building. The splendor of wallpaper seemed like the thing in a room that could speak to a person passing through it. I hadn’t even made the connection to the Cosmoplane Wall and the Goldfinch Wall. But in terms of the walls in The Lydian Gale Parr, there’s two sources. One is that the process that led to the script started from a daily process of doing cutups of Henry James’s The American onto index cards and there’s a scene—I actually haven’t reread it since then. I can’t remember exactly what the scene is, but there’s a line about finding a rough aperture in a wall in the libretto and that is an artifact of that cutup text. And then when I started to write the narrative of The Lydian Gale Parr, the figure of the Lydian Gale Parr emerged from the cutups, and at the same time I was thinking a lot about Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. And the possibility of writing anachronistically was present because I had chosen Orlando as a permissive figure. So there was a remnant wall and an opening in it, and the desire for an anachronistic figure freed from the timeline of normal human life. When I started to try to find the narrative inside the field, I was reading women’s diaries and letters from the Siege of Leningrad. And even though I don’t believe that Leningrad is walled, the idea of a siege—like this idea of laying siege to a wall and the wall as a fortification—it all joins, and part of the license of anachronism is a permission to fold one thing into another. The siege of Leningrad is a World War II event. But I began with this idea of leaving from a besieged city through a rough aperture in its wall and going out in search of a general. The word “Lydian” was floating around purely because of some artifactual soundplay from Leslie to Lydia. So then the ancient city of Lydia, which I just assumed was walled because it’s ancient—

KK: Oh yeah, they put walls around everything. 

(AF rises and begins walking down a white-walled hallway.)

KKS: And where from stems the Lydian mode in music. So from multiple directions, there’s this inflowing of wall-based seed images. And the most concrete source of it is just that cutup line from the text. In fact, I’m going to see if I can find—

AF: I just pulled out my copy too, of The American. 

KKS: I found all my cutups. 

KK: Oh, awesome. 

KKS: It’s interesting, too, cuz it starts with “This is a letter of pure friendship,” which I wouldn’t have thought was the first line—let me see if the wall is in these. 

AF: Oh, I found it. It’s on page 370 of The American in my Penguin version. 

KK: (Quietly marveling at the ready availability of artifacts) Wow. 

AF: Yeah, I took this with me to the Mont Saint-Michel, for my own little research process, where I took a bunch of environmental audio samples from the monastery, from the abbey. Meanwhile, I was reading this book to trace Karinne’s process. Did you find it in your—

KKS: I found “A rough aperture”—

AF: I’ve got the full paragraph—

KKS: (Showing the card) “A wall pierced by a rough aperture.”

AF: So Christopher Newman is this nefarious misogynistic protagonist in The American who’s made it big as an oil tycoon and then wants to complete his circle of acquisition by finding a woman, and so he goes to Paris with the intention of finding a French aristocratic wife and it doesn’t all work out for him. So (reading): “‘We shall be safer,’ said Newman, ‘where no one can hear us.’ And he led the way back into the castle court and then followed a path beside the church, which he was sure must lead into another part of the ruin. He was not deceived. It wandered along the crest of the hill and terminated before a fragment of wall pierced by a rough aperture which had once been a door—”

KKS: (Whispering) Look in that tote bag, it’s got a lot of art supplies—sorry.

AF: All good.

KKS: Parenting at the same time.

AF: “Through this aperture Newman passed and found himself in a nook peculiarly favorable to quiet conversation, as probably many an earnest couple, otherwise assorted than our friends, had assured themselves. The hill sloped abruptly away, and on the remnant of its crest were scattered two or three fragments of stone. Beneath, over the plain, lay the gathered twilight, through which, in the near distance, gleamed two or three lights from the château. Mrs. Bread rustled slowly after her guide, and Newman, satisfying himself that one of the fallen stones was steady, proposed to her to sit upon it. She cautiously complied, and he placed himself upon another, near her.”

KK: (Laughing) Those sentences! So I should also ask—can you tell me about the Lydian mode in music?

AF: Modes are simply permutations of a scale pattern, and have their own identifying interval sequences, but they are also their own worlds. Lydian is like a major scale but with a raised fourth. So instead of (singing) do re me fa, it’s do re me fi. And what that raised fourth does to the ear is create a lift, do re me fi so la ti do feels like it wants to keep going. What’s so satisfying about it compositionally is it makes us levitate. And levitation is a big part of the piece and the Lydian’s journey. It also makes it easy to pivot between one sonic landscape to another. So it’s like the Lydian mode, that fi, becomes a nexus point or a gateway. And I’ve used it as a way to switch the scene, to portal-jump from one musical situation or landscape to another.

KK: And so in writing the libretto, Karinne, were you imagining it in that mode? 

KKS: I didn’t know anything about modes when I wrote it, except that I used to play the first couple books of Bartók’s Mikrokosmos and it has little pieces titled “In Phrygian Mode,” “In Lydian mode,” “In Dorian mode” and I only had an intuitive or an ear relationship to what those names meant but without understanding how the modes relate as scales. It was just a fragment of appealing language in my mind. In some older versions of the text, before I understood it as a thing that would be sung, but rather thought of it as a thing that had little islands of music here and there, or speech that lifted into singing and then fell back into speech, I had a couple of places where it was instructed that we would just play a recording of Bartók’s “In Lydian Mode” from Mikrokosmos. So it was not a very informed inclusion but it was there for the taking for Alaina, who actually understands, you know, music theory. 

And the idea of the Lydian and the ancient city of Lydia—it’s all like accidental wordplay. Like I found—and we didn’t tell you this part of the origin story, but I was doing these cutups as something to do right after I turned in my dissertation. And I was trying to find my way back into creative work. And then I found The American in a little free library. This is when we were living in New Orleans for a year. And in the same little free library, I also found a journal inscribed “Leslie Gale Parr,” but otherwise completely blank. And so I started transcribing the cutups I was making, iterating them into a series of sentences that all began with “I,” that I would copy into Leslie Gale Parr’s notebook, and at a certain point, I accidentally swapped Leslie and Lydia. I am Leslie Gale Parr, I am Lydia Gale Parr. And then, “I’m the Lydian Gale Parr.” But you know, it was just an artifact from half-remembered history. So there’s not a real deliberate origin, but certain things just become obviously appealing and grounding, right, as you’re writing. And so you accept them. Right? “I accept you on any terms” is one of the lines in the text, but I feel like that’s also my writing process. If something shows itself to me and it feels right, then I just accept it and let myself wait until I understand it. And there are narrative connections that grew, but they grew into that artifact rather than from it as a deliberate starting point. 

KK: Alaina, I wonder if there are other images or metaphors from the text that you have musicalized, or that became fruitful compositionally.

AF: Absolutely. So, the easy one is that any time the word “letter” is sung, you get the tritone. Almost every time.

KKS: (Chuckle) I didn’t know that.

AF: The Lydian Gale Parr is searching for the general. They can’t find the general; the general for me is embodied by the French horn. Not the French horn player, not Alina Eckersley, but the music coming from the French horn. Because Alina will sing with us and in the moment when Alina singing, she becomes one of the many Lydian Gale Parrs, but the French horn part is the general that’s in the distance being pursued. For part two, where we have the court dances, I did a lot of research on the emergence of 17th-century court dance. Interestingly, at the same time, I was at a Celtic harp festival with Gelsey Bell. We were both hearing about the history of Celtic harp in 17th-century Ireland and how the Celtic harp was directly taken from folk culture and then put into court culture. And so, I was thinking about repeated dance steps and melodies that are appropriated from peasant culture, then codified, and then delivered back to their source as an edict. So it’s like playing a little bit with the loop of 17th-century court musical style and history: In The Lydian Gale Parr, we have two ballet sets, Part II and Part IV. In Part II, the court dances are more set, and then the second time they’re similar, but more organic and coming from a devised process. The first one is supposed to be in the Mont Saint-Michel moving ashen towards the sky. And so it’s venomous, nefarious, and a little bit more orderly and weird. And we get multiphonics on the bassoon (played by Leah Shaw) and the flute players (Eamon and Yoshi Weinberg) are singing into the flutes while whistling, then we emerge into a harp quartet! A galliarde. Me, Aviva Jaye, Gelsey Bell, and Yoshi all play harp. But then when we have the second dance in Part IV, it’s more cozy and like in the field and open, sonically, with a warm viola da gamba (played by Charlie Reed), and our entire cast singing, including our Ballez dancers. We constructed the music for this in a more devised process because it was appropriate for the content.

KK: That’s so fascinating. 

KKS: There was also an idea that you talked about, Alaina, when you were composing part five—which was the first part Alaina composed, and which is the journey-est part of the story—

AF: It has a really rich musical language because you travel sonically: Lydian on her travels. 

KKS: Yeah. And Alaina would talk about identifying these different cities, as if we just kept moving to a new city. And there would be these shifts, and we’d be in a new place, musically. So there’s also the journeying aspect to the narrative—not in the lines of the text, but in the movement of the story—that became like a musical idea. There are places where it feels like you’ve just arrived, you’ve just stepped off a boat and you’re like, Oh my God, what is this? You know, there’s a totally new energy to the musical place where you are. 

AF: In part five, there’s a moment where it says, “a virus was ravaging it. So I did not enter.” So I was imagining the city of Oran in Albert Camus’s The Plague and I was like, Okay, so we’re outside the wall of that city where a plague is happening. And we’re stepping through that. So the music gets really murky. And then when we leave that, we go to another city that’s like…I’m trying to remember…a port city, (sings) “I was taken to a port city.” The port city has a lot of industrial-type rhythms, and we’re hitting percussion and stuff. And then we pivot to another point where, “But we had air to breathe.” Okay, so we’re outside of the plague city, so then the music just kind of drops down and becomes more spacious because there’s room for it.

KKS: I always think of that passage as taking place on a ferry on an inland sea or like a small, you know, a channel or something. That moment. 

KK: I wanted to ask about the oratorio as a form. You touched on this a little bit, distinguishing it from an opera or a chamber opera. But—can you tell me about the oratorio, its lineage and the particular source materials that you’re thinking of?

AF: The easiest one to think about is Handel’s Messiah. 

KK: Oh, yeah, okay. 

AF: I mean, the intention, as Karinne said earlier, of an oratorio is to be music-focused, without the dramatization of staging and costume. In that way, we’re somewhat defiant, as always, in our approach.

KKS: The difference for me is that there’s staging and costume where you embody something and you play it out in space, right? And then there’s like: the telling. Like, there’s the spectacle of the telling, which to me is totally different from embodying a drama. That whole “show, don’t tell” thing? The telling is very interesting to me. I use a storytelling voice as one of the primary modes of address, even inside a theater, rather than a dramatizing voice. It’s also freeing to use the language of other forms to name the thing you’re doing, in the same way that Gertrude Stein calls her plays “landscapes” or calls her prose “portraits”—it allows you to have a freedom from everyone’s boring idea of what constitutes the right thing. And then, because you’re making this cross-disciplinary leap, you get to make up the rules for how that manifests back inside the form you’re using. Which is why I like to think of my writing as choreographic. Or, I mean, I am a choreographer, in my earliest form as an artist, so my writing is choreographic. But to use choreographic principles inside of a narrative field allows you to assume a different logic. In old drafts the play is called “an oratorio incantation,” or, “an incantation or a curse,” or like these different namings that have a performative aspect, you know, an action. Like Handel’s Messiah — it’s an action of praise, right? It’s an action of like, it’s telling a story, a religious story, but you’re there to experience the feeling of praise, in a religious sense. And oratory or oration is this rhetorical mode that becomes formalized when we put it into the Italian and call it an oratorio instead. I also really like the part of opera that’s the recitativo—it’s like the thin line between the beauty places. And so, yeah, it’s an oratorio because—this is only occurring to me now—but like the same way that you’re talking about the formalized court mode having its origin in peasant folk dances, like to me, the formalized telling remains related to the storytelling, and the enchantment of the telling, even though we’ve appointed it with a very splendid name. As a form.

AF: It’s like how music on the page is not the music. Music is the thing that you play; the oratorio is the thing that you orate, so the oratorio is going to be what we deliver it at Target Margin, what you hear in the warehouse, inside our tent.

KK: Which brings me to the image of the letter. The letter that is disrupted, not delivered, left, abandoned. And yet actually, the letters are being delivered at Target Margin, starting April 5. So I’m thinking about the letter in a couple of different ways. First of all, I think about it in relation to publishing and the way, Karinne, that I feel like 53rd State Press is a project that emerged from a desire to deliver something to someone, to circulate words among friends. But then I’m also thinking about protest, and all the different kinds of things that we as people do, are doing, in order to actually try to make peace happen. Like calling our senators and going to protests and donating to organizations, sending letters to the President. And I’m thinking about how these actions are so often dismissed by the media as being ineffectual and as not having—not moving the needle. And yet. And yet we deliver them. And what else do we do? Those are the acts we have available to us. And so, like the delivery of the letter, they may not be effectual or useful. But there’s something about the uselessness of the letter, its presence, the fact of our presence at its delivery, that is the move we can make toward peace. Question mark. 

AF: I’m gonna jump in here—I was just, a few nights ago, my best friend and I, who I met, when I was 19, pulled out—she lives in Seattle, I live in New York—we pulled out our boxes of old letters. And we read old letters that we had written to each other and sent to each other over time.

KK: (Artifactual amazement again) Oh wow.

AF: And they were very heartfelt and beautiful. Even though our intention was not political, connection is still at the root of it: I’m sending this thing to connect to you. So in the case of the Lydian Gale Parr, sending a letter or going off with a letter to be like, I’m representative of my city, and I’m coming to ask for you to stop. I’d like to connect with you through this form. It feels very sacred. Not in a religious sense, but in a spiritual sense. It taps into the desire to connect to one another on a human level. Like my hand-mind is going to connect with you through your hand-mind.

KK: I love that you had the box of letters.

KKS: It’s such a loss that we don’t send letters anymore. In terms of the letter inside The Lydian, I think there are many different letters. (Holding up another cutup) And I found—I was like, it’s got to be on a card—so here’s “She held a sealed letter. She was in distress, she was traveling. His excitement was an intenser deliberateness of which she had the key, I must profit by the occasion. I don’t know why.” (Laughter) So there was a letter in the beginning. And the idea of letters that are carried by emissaries for others, so somebody who’s not privy to the communication, or potentially—like with the child emissary who’s sent to find the general, being dispatched with this letter of, of what? She doesn’t know, right? Is it surrender? Is it? Is the general being spit upon, are we going down fighting? Is she going to be traded? Is it surrender, but you get to have this little child that I’ve sent with the letter—

(To her son Harvey, who is showing her something) That’s beautiful, Harvey. (To us) Harvey just drew some scissors. 

Um. So she’s carrying this letter and this desire to deliver it, right, which has some relationship to this power struggle, and the war. And then also in her errands, she returns to her city anachronistically through time, and every time she returns to the city, it’s this hidden wasted place. And there’s this opalescent hand in the middle of it holding a letter which is addressed to her, and the letter instructs her to begin again. And then there’s the name of the first part, which is “Letters.” As if these two emissaries have shown up in the general’s tent—but I don’t think of those as being the text of what the Lydian is carrying. Like, I think there are a lot of letters and the scales are not commensurate, right? Like they don’t all line up and lock into and reveal each other…it doesn’t close neatly as a form. 

But this idea of like carrying a letter, and then carrying this emblem of passage, right? The thing that allows her to move is some kind of insignia, some kind of ancient—this is just Game-of-Thrones-grade understanding of the politics of travel. (Laughter) Right? I hold up this token and you let me on the boat. And don’t molest me, right? So it’s like these two elements that are carried by this child (door opens to Kate’s room to reveal a man carrying a child, then closes again) that moves through a landscape for the rest of time. As for the uselessness of it, I imagine Alaina and I probably have different takes on that, but I see it as unlikely that the letter delivered to the general would achieve anything. There is a kind of absence of response from the figure of power inside the text. The general is never available, never shows himself, and never responds. Despite all that, I don’t find it at all pessimistic or hopeless-feeling—like I actually feel energized and held by the feeling of community inside of it, despite all of the violence and uselessness and refusal that passes through the grain of the thing. It’s a really weird piece for that reason and it’s why incantation is an appropriate shadow subheading, because the thing that is made by it is something that we don’t fully compass—we’re conjuring the thing, but we’re not in control of it. I don’t understand why it does what it does. So the feeling of the text is not violent, even as it recognizes the violence of the world that it travels through. And this errand is just eventually abandoned. And turned into a flag, “the flag of our country” becomes the letter flying from an antenna.

KK: And yet the Lydians multiply until the whole ensemble is essentially the Lydian.

AF: I was thinking, Karinne, how it’s like we have different aspects of interpretation. But both of them involve not knowing the end. Because this piece doesn’t have a finite point. Like, there’s no revelation, the general does not emerge, we don’t finally meet the general. So you have to imagine the end for yourself. And in your case, it’s like what you think the end will look like. And I’ve been thinking what I want it to look like. I imagine one day the general will open the letter. And that hopefulness is what’s churning the engine of the infinite loop. I was thinking of this old language that we used to use for the show. “And if she can’t find the general there’s at least hope, and if there’s not hope, there’s at least each other.”

KKS: Oh, yeah. 

AF: Like, even despite knowing the outcome, I’m still gonna keep trying. I’m still gonna do it. Call my senator. Write my best friend a letter.

KK: Yeah.

KKS: There’s a scenelet in A Tunnel Year with a bunch of little piglets suckling a big pig. And the caption is, “Nothing to see here, just dumb life sustaining itself.” Which is that feeling of like: the motor is in us all, to continue.