May 30 -June 12, 2022 // Creative Studio in the Arts District
Orasyon compositional seeds
ORASYON: A multilingual experimental operatic installation, sung and simultaneously danced in solo, sound-activated courtship choreography, inspired by the poetry of my grandmother’s Ilokano call & response dallot love-song tradition and the protective incantations of my albularyo-practicing grandfather from the Philippines.
I musically compose with the microsounds in my inherited objects and find within them the uniqueness of their invisible ‘voices.’ I dialogue with, for example, the tip of a knife blade: when sonically approached the blade contains a tiny whisper that grows into a crying, yet enraged sound when you listen very, very closely. I draw from this intimate relationship of sound-within-an-object-body to find my own personal entry point, as a contemporary I musically compose with the microsounds in my inherited objects and find within them the uniqueness of their invisible ‘voices.’ I dialogue with, for example, the tip of a knife blade: when sonically approached the blade contains a tiny whisper that grows into a crying, yet enraged sound when you listen very, very closely. I draw from this intimate relationship of sound-within-an-object-body to find my own personal entry point, as a contemporary performer whose singing voice (running through the body) acts as the main channel, additionally choreographing the multiple languages and creative legacies of my Fil-Am heritage. The greater music structure ‘holding’ me during this solo compositional process consist of the Ilokano love-songs my grandmother taught me, the lyrics of which literally spell out the exquisite pain of giving one’s heart over to the other, and the extreme, near-bloody sacrifices lovers subject themselves to in this process. As a child, I had musically absorbed these lyrics and innocently toyed with them, without the consciousness of their controversial implications. My resulting song-cycle today calls out (to) this past definition of love as a potentially weaponized force. In my own lyrics and with my own instruments (both traditional Filipino, Indigenous Filipino and ‘modern’), today I musically respond to melodic themes in the traditional love songs, as I attempt to extricate the threat of ‘the other’ from the world of self-survival my family and I was brought up in.
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About Jasmine Orpilla:
Jasmine Orpilla is an internationally awarded Ilokana/x-American vocal performance artist and experimental composer of theatrical sound installations in which she activates her lifelong practices of folk ritual, dance, combat systems and music of the Philippines, against the contemporary American framing of the 1st-generation, imperialist military culture of her own childhood. Unlimited by “soprano” nor so-called classical beauty, her unfiltered voice-in-motion exorcizes eurocentric performance structures from her muscle memory, while remaining accountable to the oral legacies and languages of the Indigenous Filipino musical systems she, her family and community remains indebted to today.
While centering the voice of the Filipinx-American body within her energetically intense solo practice as a research-based multi-instrumental/multilingual performance artist, over the decades the true stories woven throughout Jasmine Orpilla’s work humanize and honor the intersectionality of the Fil-Am body in agency.
