I can tell you that Alicia Hall Moran is a singer with countless biographies woven into her lungs; that Rachel Eliza Griffiths and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon are poets of vast interpersonal awareness; that LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is a sensitive purveyor of visual and sonic incisions. But this conveys only who they are on paper and not what they became in person when their forces cross-pollinated in Cornell’s Kiplinger Theater last Tuesday night.
The title of their performance, THROUGHLINE, felt like both descriptor and mission statement as they drew lines through the curio cabinets of our minds even while rearranging them, jumping from soul to soul until only a singularity of verbal perfume was left. Amid top notes of citrus and spice, girlhood’s questioning turned into womanhood’s indestructibility and floral mids scented the skin of forgotten children, while a base of grasslands and burnt umber evoked the muck of conflicting narratives from which these four singular artists excavated common themes.
Moran’s voice carried ahistorical futures written in historical registers. Presenting selections from her debut album, Heavy Blue, as well as new songs composed around the poetry of her sisterly collaborators, Moran spotlighted the nooks of maturation in which understandings take deepest root. Whether intensifying her mezzo brilliance in the original “Open Door” or modernizing the spirit of John Dowland’s “Flow My Tears,” she proved that emotional celebrities must first unlock their own silence before preaching to the silenced. Throughout her collage of serenades and broken dreams, she pulled at the seams of self-proclamation until “self-” dropped off and fell into the lottery of brighter tomorrows.
Griffiths likewise blurred languages of light and grain, ever the auditory bokeh in our depth of field as listeners. She took Moran’s photorealistic impulses of yearning and spun them into a pastiche of reflections. Her lyrics were odes to lived experience. Through pulling of moon and tide, creation and womb, a life-giving dance took place in everything she embraced. In her world of submarine maternity and spirits within spirits, she rendered birth pangs as tactile substances to be fashioned into words. Like a child looking upon her mother for the first time, every poem was precious and beyond worthy of the swaddling by our attentions.
Van Clief-Stefanon drew a vertical axis to Griffiths’s horizontal, exploring hierarchies of musical impulses, chemical time signatures and the types of choices that fuel epiphanies of social justice. Her breaths of transitioning spring held their shape despite the infernos of ignorance that have beset our present age, and tipped her scales of allusion toward the popular canon — polishing, for instance, Rihanna’s diamond until its dark matter threw open the wings of an intergalactic politic. Pulling names from the depths of her blood, she homed in on key tones of physical relationships and lifted valor with gloved tongue as an object worthy of study. Flipping over male dominance like a fish in a pan, she captured its briny smoke in her nostrils and exhaled sweet critique.
Diggs’s conveyance of videos and stills taken by Griffiths was the rhythm section behind the soloists, to which she added her own interdisciplinary foraging as filtered through a tabletop array of electronica. Her digitally altered singing worked at molecular levels, made clear as the artists laid down a path of composites aching from the grammar of their integration. Diggs divided the moon like an egg and deferred her feel for montage to three women who shelter all the beauty of the world in their consonance.
The THROUGHLINE project sees something beyond the obvious. Experiencing it was akin to seeing a dream you once forgot now being laid bare, newborn edges and all. Its discourse was so precise that it sharpened blades of memory until only reality was left by their slice. It was music for those that fortune once threw into a pool of amniotic fluid and walked away disappointed when they didn’t drown. Music for those who’ve since learned that every change of dress is another chance at remembrance. Music that looked us straight in the eyes and said: You want to know what real privilege is? Sharing the duty of those dismantling its infrastructures, throwing away the master’s tools, and rebuilding — letter by letter — the temples of our bodies without warning signs, fire escapes or trigger alarms.
Moran, Griffiths, Van Clief-Stefanon and Diggs were their own microphones, amplified through self-expression — the strongest form of faith — and built on the assertion that nothing is real until spoken, nothing spoken until real. These were the women in the room, voices of a collective body whose signatures imprinted ears and eyes with every individual step forward, and the honor of unfolding said signatures out into this tightly and artfully folded world will stay with us. Perseverant. Honest. Unafraid.
Tyran Grillo is a graduate student at Cornell University. He can be reached at [email protected].