“Voices”

Longtime Cavafy admirer Laurie Anderson reads “Voices” (1904, after the original “Sweet Voices” in 1894), the haunting early work by Cavafy. Playing with memory and the nature of time, the poem provides fertile ground for the deeply personal audio and visual styles of musician-composer-storyteller Jad Abumrad and artist-filmmaker Mac Premo, and includes materials from the Cavafy archive.

Abumrad reflected, “I'm very interested in the ways in which we, singular human beings living singular lives, are actually living a continuum. I’ve thought about my grandfather and this moment in Lebanon where he had to bury his mother on the side of the road as they were marching sixty miles over a mountain. That experience shaped him in a way that caused him to demand certain things of himself and then of his kids, and then his kids of me. So there's some way in which his ghost is always with me. So that line… ‘Sometimes, within our dreams, they speak’…I connect to that. Also, there’s this: Recently, there's something oppressive to me about narrative. It takes the utter chaos of experience, and like a tyrant, organizes it into a beginning and middle and end. So for me, this project is part of me trying to find new ways to define storytelling.”

Duration: 5 minutes