Piece Her Together

The Body of the State (2017) - Eliza Brown in collaboration with Lara Campbell, Jeneth Hughes, Michelle Jones, Melinda Loveless, Anastazia Schmid, and Brittney Watson
Monodrama in three scenes for soprano, ensemble, and fixed media
Video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgmYGcBpo-Y&t=3s

When stranger things happen (2017) - Katherine Young
Monodrama for ten players, lost objects, electronics, and amplification
Video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM5c9VLnRrw

Director’s Note:
For me, Piece Her Together is about identity and fragmentation. Women are many things all at once–a product of our history, the forces that limit us in society, our perception of experiences, etc. The stories of Piece Her Together remind us that we have agency; hopefully we can piece together our narratives and take ownership over the way we tell our stories. -Emmi Hilger
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The Body of the State (2017) - Eliza Brown
Monodrama in three scenes for soprano, ensemble, and fixed media

Scene I: Juana’s chambers at the court of Burgundy, 1502
Scene II: A chapel near Granada, 1506
Scene III: A small room in Tordesillas, 1509 and decades beyond

On its surface, The Body of the State tells the story of Juana of Castile (1479-1555), daughter of Spain’s “Catholic monarchs” Ferdinand and Isabella. Juana became sole heir to the Castilian throne in 1506, after the deaths of her mother and husband (Phillippe of Burgundy). But she never truly ruled: her father proclaimed her insane, assumed the political duties of the crown, and confined her to a house in remote Tordesillas, where she remained for the rest of her life. History remembered her as “Juana the Mad,” prone to excesses of passion and anger, a maudlin footnote in the tale of the Hapsburg dynasty. But modern historians have revised this image of Juana, portraying her as an intelligent woman whose erratic behavior, whether calculated or involuntary, was a desperate and understandable response to the lifelong suppression of her agency and personal freedom by her family, religious advisors, and the aristocratic and political classes of Spain. The Body of the State aims for a nuanced portrayal of Juana’s psychological deterioration and resilience within this oppressive context. The instrumentalists who perform the piece are onstage with the singer, musically and theatrically representing the complex relationships and social forces governing Juana’s existence. There are three scenes, each depicting a different phase of Juana’s life. Scene I, marriage: Juana appeals to her household servants as she grows increasingly suspicious of the husband she loves. Scene II, widowhood and heir status: Juana publicly mourns Phillippe and attempts to assume power while surrounded by courtiers of uncertain loyalty. Scene III, incarceration: Juana reflects alone, then confronts a priest who visits her to force a confession for non-existent sins.

The perspectives of seven contemporary women–myself and six women with first-hand knowledge of incarceration–are also woven into The Body of the State. Last fall I took part in a reading group at DePauw University that met via videoconference with the graduate class at Indiana Women’s Prison. Its topic was epistemic injustice, which occurs when we discount someone’s ability to be a knower and reduce that person to a knowable object. Epistemic injustice affects many marginalized people, including the incarcerated. As I learned about epistemic injustice from the women at IWP, I realized its role in Juana’s story. Juana’s physical ability to bear children and her continued bodily existence as Queen in name only were necessary to shore up her family’s dynastic power, but no other aspect of her selfhood was valued. She was, in a deeply dehumanizing sense, a body of the state. I began to understand that many power imbalances in modern society are marked by the insidious coupling of epistemic injustice and bodily control. Victims of this coupling may display trauma-induced behaviors that those in power can then use to justify further indignities.

Learning about epistemic injustice from the women at IWP altered my understanding of the character and of the music that should convey her story. I felt an ethical responsibility to tell the IWP scholars that their work had influenced mine, and an ethical desire to offer them a way to participate in this project as a small corrective to epistemic injustice. Several women were interested, and in the end a group of seven of us met regularly at IWP over the next five months. We read a book about Juana together and wrote responses to it in the form of poems, essays, and free-written ideas about the intersections between her life and ours. We synthesized elements from these texts into the libretto for Scenes I and III, and decided to retain my pre-existing (2014) text for Scene II. We developed a group vocal improvisation practice using spoken and sung fragments of text. Recordings of these improvisations, as well as the ubiquitous hiss of the HVAC systems in the IWP education building, are featured in the work’s electronics.

I am deeply grateful for the knowledge, talent, honesty, generosity, and more that each member of the group brought to this project. As we worked, we increasingly felt that the project was something we were doing for Juana – a way of providing long-overdue epistemic redress for some of the injustices she endured. In the words of co-author Michelle Jones: “Today, we validate Juana’s struggle as a woman who was unjustly imprisoned. We redeem her in our work; reinstate her personhood and declare her worth. We counter epistemic injustice by re-writing the narrative, revealing the complexities and textures of Juana’s whole story.

-Eliza Brown

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When stranger things happen (2017) - Katherine Young
Monodrama for ten players, lost objects, electronics, and amplification

Overture: Before / The Initial Descent
Scene I: Immediately After
Scene II: Alone, Untethered (Recitative)
Scene III: On the Case (Aria)
Scene IV: The Second Descent (Recitative-Aria-Reciative)
Scene V: Dancing
Scene VI: Reassembling (Recitative-Aria)

When stranger things happen is about mysteries: of things we've lost, things we make, and who we become along the way.

This project is also about collaboration. It's an attempt to embed a collaborative practice—one that involves sharing stories with each other—into the music itself.

This undertaking was inspired by Kelly Link’s short story “The Girl Detective,” which I read as a creative coming of age story. It’s also a noir meditation on loss, myths of femininity, and the power of the imagination. The girl detective’s investigations take her up trees; into dreams—hers and other people’s; and down into an underworld where lost things accumulate and stranger things happen.

Link’s story contains many lists...of misplaced, lost, found, and untethered objects. Compiling these, I began thinking about things that I’ve lost—specific objects with or without sentimental value. Recalling relationships, people, qualities, and perspectives that have slipped away, I added objects representing these to my list. Expanding further, I asked my musical collaborators, “What’s something you’ve lost?” I added all these to Link’s tallies, and the important and unimportant lost things lost became potential tools for making sound.

Here’s a short list, compiled with Amanda, Jesse, Nico, Dave, Sean, Rob, Michael, Greg, and Eliza, some of which made it into our piece: underwear, one shoe (left), socks, retainers, Amelia Earhart, glasses (prescription), my breath, Grandpa Burt, bobby pins, a small Japanese bell, a 2011 Honda CRV, a tea set, my umbrella, small vintage Jell-O molds, all my CDs, keys, the Queen of Spades from a deck of cards, cell phones (multiple), pins (jewelry), wedding rings, 7th grade HW, a $.50 coin, her Mother, a gold chain, my wallet.

The mystery of the objects (Why they are significant? How were they lost? What strange things happen when they are found? What music can they make together) becomes one of the three layers of the narrative of When stranger thing happens. The first is Link's story, with its noir atmosphere, mysteries embedded within mysteries, and coming of age story. This creative, feminist coming-of-age story was a personal narrative that Amanda De Boer Bartlett, Emmi Hilger, and I could deeply relate to from our own experiences. Thus, the third layer becomes about the performers ourselves.

-Katherine Young