Back in April, The Narrators collaborated with the Musica Sacra, a 35-piece chamber orchestra here in Denver. They gave us three pieces of music and asked our storytellers to write something inspired by the music. In exchange, we gave them three stories and they chose three pieces of music to accompany them. We wrote and edited and memorized and rehearsed and revised and then rehearsed some more… paragraphs were shifted out of their natural order to work with the music, and the orchestral arrangements were shuffled and modified to jive with the beats of the story. It was a dramatic departure from our usual low-key routine. The end result was beautiful, watching our storytellers transform their personal experiences into these sweeping, powerful performances.
This week’s story comes from that show. Ellen K. Graham is a playwright and long-time favorite of The Narrators. Her story was paired Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending,” which for copyright reasons we do not play in its entirety. This story was originally recorded at Augustana Arts on 24 April 2015. The theme of the evening was “Two-Way Street.”
Our theme music is by our friend Whalehawk (aka the Grammy-nominated musician Jake Sanders).