f28
is letting on as we file out for the interval. There are awestruck whispers, open mouths, talk of tears. And that’s because we’ve seen and heard something beautiful, something both familiar and new, choreographed and free, ancient and modern and in harmony with all of its elements.
he tears come particularly during the story of Miss Lella, told in the form of a crankie – an eigh- teen-inch high, 60-foot long scrolling fabric in a wooden frame, based on 19th Century parlour panoramas. Silhouettes illustrating memo- ries of Miss Lella unfurl as Elizabeth recites those same recollections, as told to her by those whose lives this pillar of the commu- nity touched. The simple details of both the story and the medium are joyfully moving. And the crankies are as integral to Anna and Elizabeth’s work as the songs.
T
“When I saw the crankie that Anna made in college I was like…” Elizabeth LaPrelle, who lives in rural Virginia where she grew up, takes a long loud intake of breath. “It was like a huge click. I had been thinking about ballads as related to theatre for a long time but I guess I had half-baked ideas. I’d never really taken steps to figure out how that would work in a performance.”
Everything we see and hear Anna and Elizabeth do today began that first night. Perhaps one day someone will make a crankie of their meeting. “We met through ballads. But when we met the first thing we did was talk. So much talking. Then we started making crafts together.”
“I was in a string band at the time and I also had these half-baked things I would bring to them like, ‘We should tell stories.’ And it was never met with any interest. So when I met Elizabeth… I had never met any-
one who identified as a ballad singer before. Even within the folk music scene that was a rare thing. But we started talking about the stories and the people part of the music. The way that we’re nerdy together is to do with stories as opposed to the history of chords in old-time music. The thing that we shared was that, and this idea of making a show rather than a concert. And so our first show had a backlit crankie and a dolls’ house with papier-mâché dolls and Eliza- beth setting a table while singing a ballad.”
“Why I’m so inspired by Laurie Ander- son is because I remember reading about her saying, ‘If I had to tell you one thing that I am, I’m a storyteller.’ And that felt really true to who we are as a pair. We’re interested in stories so whatever we have to learn how to do in order to tell a story, we’ll try to learn. All the crankies are done in mediums where it was the first time we did it. That was our first acrylic painting, and Elizabeth’s first major sewing project and our first time doing paper cuts and linoleum block prints. These films we’ve just made…”
“We’ve never made a film before. And
it’s also the first time we’ve worked with a choreographer. It’s not reinventing the wheel but we learn a lot of new trades by having a fairly high stakes project right off the bat,” Elizabeth laughs, aware of the potential for calamity in such naïve artistic ambition.
But back to Miss Lella, this pet crow- owning, always laughing grandmother to all; who they learned about from an elderly Kentucky woman named Letha Sexton.
“We’ve taken the Miss Lella crankie back to where she lived a few times,” Eliza- beth explains. “I’d be cranking through the scenes and Letha would go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s Claude feeding the cat. That looks just like Claude!’ I think she was being generous.”
“The first time we brought it to her we showed it on her kitchen table,” says Anna. “She really liked it. And then she called her brother and that’s when she said this great line: ‘Rodney, they made a TV of Miss Lella!’ And I’ve also shown it to the musician, there’s one musician in the image of the musicians in the crankie that’s still alive – our friend Earl. And I showed it to him in a motel in East Kentucky and again he was like, ‘Ha ha, you put me on TV.’ We would call Letha when we’d done like an online Tiny Desk concert for [US radio syndicator] NPR. And how do you explain to an older person the meaning of a Tiny Desk concert? We just tried to let her know that we were sharing this with a lot of people.”
Lately Miss Lella’s role in the show has expanded to include a fantastical tale in which she catches the moon in a fan, per- formed with synchronised movement from Anna and Elizabeth.
“T
hat’s so new,” enthuses Anna, “but we’ve finally found the perfect person for that piece. We’ve given lots of old ladies’
names to that. It was originally written about Texas Gladden because there’s a lovely picture of her with a fan. But we’ve given it to Miss Lella who’s already a little bit mythical because you’ve seen her story.”
All we know of this magical-sounding woman is what people have told you. We have no way of knowing what is and isn’t true, so why not tell new stories?
“Right. Which is to do with the way memory is such a big part of what folk music is. And memory is myth making.”
There’s more to Anna and Elizabeth’s journeying back to the source of songs and stories than a thoughtful gesture or inquis-
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84
