Theater Preview: The Wexner Center Presents Anonymous Ensemble's Ohio Premiere of 'Llontop'
The Wexner Center for the Arts continues a strong performing arts season with an Ohio Premiere from the Brooklyn-based Anonymous Ensemble, Llontop. This fascinating interdisciplinary work, directed by Ashley Kelly Tata, combines an installation with songs and poems from acclaimed Peruvian poet Irma Alvarez-Ccoscco. Llontop delves into the history and the present of the Quechua […] The Wexner Center for the Arts is hosting the Ohio Premiere of the Brooklyn-based Anonymous Ensemble's interdisciplinary work, Llontop, which combines an installation with songs and poems from Peruvian poet Irma Alvarez-Ccoscco. The work explores the history and present of the Quechua people of the Andes region, alongside personal history, and Columbus, particularly OSU. The company's co-founder and designer Eamonn Farrell shared his vision for the work, starting with ideas about playing with light as a generative medium and using machine learning. The primary collaborators are Irma Alvarez, the composer Paul Pinto, and the director Ashley Tata.
प्रकाशित : 4 सप्ताह पहले द्वारा Richard Sanford में
The Wexner Center for the Arts continues a strong performing arts season with an Ohio Premiere from the Brooklyn-based Anonymous Ensemble, Llontop. This fascinating interdisciplinary work, directed by Ashley Kelly Tata, combines an installation with songs and poems from acclaimed Peruvian poet Irma Alvarez-Ccoscco.
Llontop delves into the history and the present of the Quechua people of the Andes region, alongside personal history, and Columbus – especially OSU – was key to its creation. I spoke with Anonymous co-founder and designer Eamonn Farrell at the Wexner Center in advance of this run. Below has been edited for clarity and length.
Columbus Underground: If you don’t mind, let’s start by talking about Anonymous. How did the company evolve?
Eamonn Farrell: There are four of us [including Lucrecia Briceño (lighting), Jessica Weinstein (performer), and Liz Davito (sound)], and we always make devised, new works from scratch. [The works] always involve technology and we assemble other artists to make each project. For this one, our primary collaborators are Irma Alvarez-Ccoscco, the composer Paul Pinto, and the director Ashley Tata.
[For Llontop,] the idea started with Lucrecia, who’s from Peru. My Grandmother is also from Peru. We were talking about Peruvian culture and indigenous ancestry during the pandemic. We didn’t start with a text; we started with ideas about playing with lights and objects and machine learning.
Oftentimes, we start with some impossible premise – our idea was, “What if we just start with light as a generative medium?” Normally, we think of light as something that gets put on a production at the end – after it’s all staged. We wanted to play with [starting] from light; we had lasers, our first workshop was hanging a light plot, having a fog machine, and a bunch of objects.
I have all these objects – heirlooms – I inherited from my Grandmother.
We started having Zoom meetings with scholars of indigenous culture and language, and one of the early people we met was Elvia Andía Grágeda, who’s from Bolivia. [She] teaches Quechua here at OSU and helped introduce us to Quechua culture.
Then we met Irma and knew that was the voice we wanted.
We [thought] light needs to be reflected off something to be perceived by humans and we started thinking about what if machines perceive it? We started to play with machine learning – a friend who’s a technologist introduced us to Google’s T12.
CU: You grew up with heirlooms – did they come with stories around them or were they objects as objects [to you as a child]?
EF: The objects were very important to my grandmother, and what was interesting about them is they’re mostly from indigenous cultures, and my grandmother never admitted she had indigenous ancestry. Talking about that with Lucrecia really informed [the work]. Indigenous ancestry is still very much stigmatized in Peru, in contrast to how it’s kind of fetishized in North American culture, right?
Then we learned – especially through Irma – that there is a burgeoning indigenous pride [and] advocacy movement happening in Peru right now. People are speaking the language more openly: speaking it in government and schools; making music in it; writing dissertations. Quechua is the most widely spoken American indigenous language; it’s spoken by 11 million people.
CU: You mentioned the scholar is from Bolivia, and your grandmother is Peruvian. Is this the whole Andean region?
EF: It’s actually spoken in the whole extent of the Incan Empire which was really vast: the whole length of the Andes, from Colombia, through Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, even a little bit of Chile. Similar to the Roman Empire, when the Incas took over they imposed their language on all of that population as a lingua franca. Similar to how Latin gave birth to all the Romance languages, Quechua created all these dialects.
CU: What spoke to the group about Irma Alvarez-Ccoscco? How did you know her voice was the voice of this work?
EF: The connection we made was very much about advocacy, particularly digital advocacy. She’s been active in Peru and now lives in the United States. [She’s been] advocating for indigenous languages to have equal footing in technological platforms, having [them] be translatable and searchable. For instance, when we started [Llontop] Google didn’t translate Quechua; but there are European languages [available] only spoken by two million people. A year and a half ago, they started offering it. Irma was interviewed by the New York Times about that.
She’d published widely in Spanish [as well as Quechua], though she doesn’t like to do her own translations, and we had English translations [produced]. We present the work tri-lingually – she performs primarily in Quechua but we have the Spanish and English translations like supertitles.
We went through her poems and chose the ones we wanted to put together. We’ve got certain dates like 1532, the year Pizarro invaded and started the conquest and subjugation of the Indian people and [the poems] go right up to the present. [She] tells these moments in history through the lens of Indian women: there are a lot of mothers, there’s a famous figure, some people are fictionalized.
When Irma came in, we were deep in machine learning. When she started interacting with the objects, she started talking about museums: she has a different experience of the objects because they have a different cultural place. She can go to museums and sing to the objects. A lot of times objects and even human remains have a degree of personhood; [in museums] they feel like they’re trapped or like they’re in prison.
So we became interested in turning the idea of a museum display around to where the objects become subjectified and speak to the viewer. It took years of software development to allow the audience to go around with their phones and look at the objects, and the objects will trigger audio and podcast clips like a choose your own adventure. The audience is free to move around.
CU: How’d the director come into the project?
EF: They joined with the first workshop and helped shape the process. We’re a company of designers and performers so it’s been good to have that outside eye piecing it together and keeping an eye on the overall picture.
CU: Thank you for your time. What else do you want people to know about Llontop?
EF: One thing that’s very important to us is we’re making this with indigenous people in mind. In a couple of weeks, we will be in northern Virginia with a Bolivian immigrant community. We’ve [performed] it in Paterson, New Jersey, where there’s a large Peruvian population. In the Bronx. There are populations all over – we’d very much like to encourage Latin American and particularly Indian people to come to the work. There are – I think – a lot of resonances for the rest of the population that comes, but we’re going to have a conversation after the performance with [OSU’s] Quechua department to help translate.
Llontop runs April 4 through 7 with performances starting at 7 p.m. at the Wexner Center for the Arts. For tickets – starting at $6 – and more information, visit wexarts.org/performing-arts/anonymous-ensemble.