Performance artists Elizabeth LaPrelle and Anna Roberts-Gevalt are storytellers who weave together haunting and atmospheric traditional ballads with visual art and historic research. Devotees of Appalachian music, the duo, who perform as Anna & Elizabeth, will bring their unique stage presentation to The Monadnock Center for History and Culture Friday night for MacDowell Downtown at 7:30 p.m.
The duo is at MacDowell preparing for their third cycle of performances, which will take them to the United Kingdom in August, to the Midwest in September, and then back to New England in November. While in residence, they are sifting through a treasure trove of folk ballads they’ve each collected from archives in Vermont and Virginia.
On Friday, they’ll offer a sample of their stage show, which combines music, storytelling, and visuals. They’ll perform material from their last show: singing harmonies and accompanying themselves with guitar, fiddle, and banjo. They’ll also talk about their approach to curating traditional American music. To illuminate the stories told within the songs, Anna and Elizabeth have constructed hand-turned scrolling panoramas with sewn tapestries, backlit paintings, and shadow puppets.
“Part of our show is about the process of learning these songs along the way,” says Roberts-Gevalt. “We like to attach a name to a song, and then attach a town to that name,” says LaPrelle, picking up her partner’s thought. “Learning about traditional music is a neat way of learning about your place, and who lived in that place before you did,” adds Roberts-Gevalt.
On Friday the two musicians will take the audience through the process of discovering a song and creating a scroll to connect the performance to the ballad’s original singer or perhaps its subject matter. Roberts-Gevalt might open a song on fiddle while LaPrelle provides narrative lead vocal before the two join together in harmonizing song. The effect is mesmerizing.
Hailing from Virginia, LaPrelle has pursued mountain ballads for more than 10 years and spent last winter scouring music archives in her home state. Roberts-Gevalt, who is a multi-instrumentalist, spent most of the month of December combing through the Helen Hartness Flanders folksong archive at Middlebury College in her native Vermont. The two have brought their findings to MacDowell to select about a dozen songs to arrange for their next set of shows.
“Now we’re just putting it all through our filter,” says Roberts-Gevalt. “Yes, a pretty heavy filter,” responds LaPrelle. Some of the songs came with transcribed music, others did not and the two will have to piece the score together from what they hear in old recordings. Part of the filtering has to do with condensing long ballads into shorter songs to make it simpler for the audience to process the story. In some cases, the stories leave them with visual impressions that they then turn into “crankie” scrolls, which are works of art in themselves.
Of their recent findings, Roberts-Gevalt says, “You can notice differences,” and LaPrelle adds, “Yes, regional trends.” LaPrelle explains that aside from different instrumentation, the songs uncovered in Vermont have less a bluesy, African-American influence than songs found in Virginia. The Vermont recordings, on the other hand, have a distinct French-Canadian influence absent in the Virginia archives.
“Some time in the not too distant past, this music existed mainly in people’s homes and was sung before or after dinner,” says Roberts-Gevalt. “There’s always that context and we want to find ways of placing an audience in that context, the intimacy of listening in someone’s home,” finishes LaPrelle.
For a taste of what that might have been like before the advent of recorded music, don’t miss this intimate evening of traditional ballads and storytelling with Anna & Elizabeth. It all takes place tomorrow evening at The Monadnock Center for History and Culture at 7:30 p.m. Doors open at 7 p.m. with light refreshments served.