Montalvo Arts Center : Divide Light Blog

A Small Italic Seed

By Lesley Dill on WED, MAY 28TH 2008, NOON

Letters of inspiration to Daniel Hughes, music director for Divide Light and director of The Choral Project (TCP) from Lesley Dill

"This is a blossom of the brain a small italic seed" E. D.

Dear Daniel and TCP,

I so look forward to seeing and hearing you in a few days.

As we make our way through the music of Divide Light (TCP, operatic voice, and Del Sol string quartet), the projected videos and the performative costumes, keep in mind that this opera of light is similar to a river of sound. As you sing through it, perhaps water — streaming, running, trickling, meandering or roaring — is an apt metaphor for your vocal chords. At the end, we have a waterfall ending in a still pool.

Also, in Dickinson's language there are many, many references to nature, to flowers - she had a huge flower garden. It sometimes seems in reading the poetry, that the underlying truth of her speaking to the emotional, existential human-being life, is this truth of the unfolding and truth of natural growth.

Budding, blossoming, dissolution. Flowers and leaves both begin their lives as tiny organisms that uncurl, unfold, that reach for the light. The bloom slowly moves through stages, revealing different colors and shapes. It ultimately falls apart, strewing its petals on the ground. From bud, to blossom, to disintegration — each stage has its own time of fulfillment and recession — each instant is potential for an exquisite awareness.

See you soon,
Lesley

Civil War

By Lesley Dill on MON, MAY 26TH 2008, NOON

Letters of inspiration to Daniel Hughes, music director for Divide Light and director of The Choral Project (TCP) from Lesley Dill

Dear Daniel and TCP,

On this day, Memorial Day, it is good to remember that Emily Dickinson was writing much of her poetry during the Civil War. The men of her town of Amherst were decimated by the war. They were killed, wounded and far away from home, and they brought back home sickness and disease, writing letters all the while.

Her language, through the language of the internal world is also the language of fact - she writes of death, sorrow and loneliness ("For each ecstatic instant, I am afraid, wounded deer, loneliness are songs you will be singing"). And perhaps that is one reason why her language is so refreshing to us — it speaks the truth of things with the insight of naming.

Duty, honor, respect,
Lesley

Intimacy and Belief in Words

By Lesley Dill on MON, MAY 26TH 2008, NOON

Letters of inspiration to Daniel Hughes, music director for Divide Light and director of The Choral Project (TCP) from Lesley Dill

Dear Daniel and TCP,

The intimacy and belief in words is integral in my work, be it performance or the visual world of photography (which you will see in the video projections for Divide Light). Words stain into us. Words attach themselves to us in different places - they land on various parts of the body when we are listening and they emit themselves from different parts as well. Some words we don't fully absorb, some words we take in deep, and some words we lose. We grow fat with language and we also grow thin as language flows out of us. The floating suspended nature of language exhaled through song or speech is a kind of Northern Lights of understanding.

Sing on, my thoughts are with you.

Lesley

Divide Light

By Lesley Dill on FRI, APR 18TH 2008, NOON

In her own words....Lesley Dill (creator of Divide Light)

Sense inside the sound, sound inside the sense...

In writing music for Divide Light, we walk carefully between interpreting the austerity of language with too little passion and interpreting the depth of the emotion with sentimental sincerity. Within the complicated syntax of the poetry, double negatives often take the place of simple statement. Dickinson's blunt assertions are usually dualistic – the darkness is dark, but also light (“I see thee better in the dark”); the lightness is light but also dangerous (“crisis is a hair toward which the forces creep”). The multi-focused possibility of emotional destination is sprinkled throughout the language. Crisis and impact are in an instant, but the resonance of mystery lingers.

Her words are not necessarily holders/reliquaries of accepted meaning. There’s often a feeling of unknown boundaries of intent and this intention is often revealed in juxtaposition - "arid pleasure," "how ruthless are the gentle," "the infinite a sudden guest," "the life that tied too tight escapes."

And when the language aims for meaning, it hits it with a bullet — "I like a look of agony because I know it’s true"..."To be alive is power."

The atmosphere of Dickinson’s poetry in general is one of theatrical interiority ("much madness is divinest sense"). Dickinson establishes an emotional space that is more of a verb than a noun - acerbic, fragmentary, this metaphorical setting tips and moves ("an instant’s push demolishes/a questioning dissolves") like a spinning stage set where chairs and actors intersperse.

Passionate, abrupt, irrational — the language skews one into the mysterious. The feeling of evanescence sets up a desire for some transcendent truth. It is about mystery rather than display/purity rather than overstatement. There is deep passion in relation to big, dark, small, light, grieving and celebratory emotions. Usually each emotion is linguistically parsed until it reveals a seed of a contradictory emotion. The shadow is definitely breathed, but with such an embedded vitality ("doom is the house without a door," "for each ecstatic instant we must an anguish pay") that it moves one to recognition and empathy rather than depression and despair.

In our opera, the performers will move through this trajectory of the sublime, which is present in the bath of emotions we live in every day. It is an opera of precision of the heart.