Darkling, I Listen
by Bethany Ides & Ryan Sullivan
Darkling, I Listen is Ryan Sullivan (Suggestions, Two Percent Majesty, Yarl Corbie) & Bethany Ides (VISITATION, FO (A) RM, AREA).
Overview (written by Ides)
The songs that Ryan Sullivan & I recorded as “Darkling, I Listen” emerged from a mutual interest in text/lyrics that are doing double-duty. We shared a fascination for re-interpreting language that is on its face banal & loading it up with improbable intensity. Ryan & I loved making work that felt to us like the dreams of these actual incidents -- more associative, more unnervingly weird, in the re-telling.
Ryan & I recorded "Letter Opening Scene" & "Two-Spirit" in his apartment in Portland, OR, over 2 subsequent summer visits (2011 & 2012). "Letter Opening Scene" contains lyrics transposed from the film Miami Connection by Woo-sang Park (1987) along with text from a storied letter addressed to rats that was purportedly discovered in a basement crevice in 1945. Both texts evoke a dramatic pivot made in desperation as circumstances supersede what is knowable or controllable. "Two-Spirit" contains exchanges verbatim from that summer's season of The Bachelorette along with lines of Zuni narrative poetry, translated by Dennis Tedlock."Wing Upon Wing" was a collaboration over distance -- Ryan sent me the instrumental track (complete with his background vocals) & I recorded vocals over it. That song is simply about watching a hawk tear apart a pigeon on a lamppost in Brooklyn in front of everyone.
The name, "Darkling, I Listen," is likewise borrowed; we were playing the alternate life of a story -- a tragic thriller about not being able to tell who's who & what's what.
Bethany Ides is a queer writer, artist, teacher, theater-maker, and organizer who also co-directs DOORS UNLIMITED with Ora Ferdman and Mahshid Rafiei. DOORS UNLIMITED is a generative structure for hosting collaborative research in convocational technologies and speculative folklife. DOORS UNLIMITED events typically engage large groups of people walking, eating, reading, diagramming, discussing, experimenting, play-acting, planning, drawing, laughing, listening, and/or deciding together.
Ides’ research involves applied drama, decolonial education, investigative poetics and operatics, community reading rituals, sites of public discourse, ephemeral and inscrutable communications, and collectivity. Her courses at Pratt often focus on particular aspects of relation and ways that the pedagogical social environment reflects those. Topics like Play, Dialogue, Sense-making, Sharing, Interiority, and Pleasure become structuring principles for modes of inquiry that actively combine academic study with imaginative intervention and collective reflection.
Originally appeared in the online supplement to the Beyond Category issue 43.2 - 44.1