Finding Your Voice Through Predator Songstress
Imagine a time when you lost your voice. What did it look like? Feel like? Sound like? In Degenerate Art Ensemble’s Predator Songstress, performed and recorded in 2015 at On the Boards in Seattle, WA, it looks like Ximena, the protagonist, lying on a stage in a singular box of light—drowning but trying to stay afloat. It feels painful. It sounds like high and low toned voices desperately calling out for each other. After watching a filmed version of Predator Songstress through ontheboards.tv, I too was at a loss for words until voiceless Ximena summoned strength and stood. She begins to communicate using touch and gestures, telling us that this is not the end but the beginning. This moment reminds me that there is more to this story and that I must press on, too.
It begins with a projected video that resembles security footage of the theater lobby just moments before the show began. Caught on camera is Ximena singing, a small crowd gathered around her; like me, they are unknowingly acquainting themselves with Predator Songstress’ anti-heroine and indulging in a voice being heard for the last time. By the time the video ends, it is dark, quiet, calm until a sudden flash brings up both the stage lights and our guard. Ximena’s brother, Xavier, catapults himself onto the stage and through a series of carefully chosen phrases and rigid, calculated movements, he tells us the story of how his sister came to be captured and her voice stolen by their world’s government, The Harvesters. Xavier’s dance and metered narration is specific and deliberate, a cipher; it tells us that there are many ways to receive information, and that we must pay attention to them all. We then follow Ximena—nicknamed the Songstress—as she escapes imprisonment, balances on the edge of order and chaos, and conspires with rebel forces as a means of regaining her voice.
In order to do their part in aiding the rebels, audience members are encouraged to participate in interviews being conducted throughout intermission. This concludes when a singular light comes up on center stage, revealing Ximena adorning a new dress and headpiece that shines gold—a beacon in the dark. The room falls silent as a screen begins projecting the interviewees recorded just moments prior. The fourth wall crumbles and with each wave of her hand, the Songstress signals for a new story to be played. My eyes grew wide and my mouth agape, any questions I had faded, and I imagine everyone in the room experienced something similar in this collective moment of clarity. It is the audience’s voices that serve as the voice of Ximena and their stories that make up the very existence of Predator Songstress. Despite being more observer than participant, I can still feel the personal connection forged between spectator and spectacle. From this point on, when the stakes are heightened for Ximena, they are heightened for us. When Ximena and Xavier are put on trial, we feel their distress. And when our Songstress sings out one final time in a punk-rock ballad declaring, “nothing can take your breath away”, we listen and let it become our new mantra.
When asked how works like Predator Songstress are born, Degenerate Art Ensemble said "We peel one layer, look deeper, inquire persistently and prop open our ears and senses to let the space, the spirits and the environment speak"; as a viewer it does well to follow suit. A fairytale set in a dystopian society, Predator Songstress may be mistaken for other-worldly, but if we allow ourselves to listen as the work speaks to us, it is entirely too real. Through various forms of communication culminating as one language, it encourages us to make connections with our own society and individual lives. It explains that Ximena is not voiceless; we tell her story when we tell our own, not about when we lost our voice, but about what we did when we got it back.