THE LYDIAN GALE PARR

COMPOSED BY ALAINA FERRIS
LIBRETTO BY KARINNE KEITHLEY SYERS
DIRECTED BY MEGHAN FINN
CHOREOGRAPHED BY KATY PYLE
SPATIAL INSTRUMENT BY EAMON GOODMAN 

AT TARGET MARGIN THEATER

CO-PRODUCED WITH AMANDA + JAMES

APRIL 5-20 2024

The Lydian Gale Parr is a surreal and poetic chamber oratorio with ballet: a child emissary sent from a city under siege to deliver a letter to the attacking general. But the emissary cannot find him; at every place of arrival, the general has just left. Traveling through space and time, the emissary begins to shapeshift, to manifest freely: as boy, as girl, as man, as woman, as the Lydian Gale Parr, who journeys from ancient cities to cargo ships on an infinite errand to ask for an end to violence. They slip in and out of disparate webs of belonging, yet hold fast to their quest: a ghost child of war.

Commissioned by The Charles and Joan Gross Family Foundation, with support from: The NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre by the City of New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment in association with The New York Foundation for the Arts, and additional support from The Hermitage Artist Retreat and The Movement Lab at Barnard College.

This work was developed, in part, under the auspices of an Artist Residency at the Movement Lab in the Milstein Center of
Barnard College