Performance art meets literary étrangeté: Lina Lapelytè’s The Mutes makes my uncanny familiar [by Sean Ashton]

SA-Lina Lapelytè  The Mutes  2022 © Rasa J

Behind the nettles, the wandering un-choral of Lina Lapelytè’s ”The Mutes”, turned the strangeness of ”I have never driven a 7.5 ton truck” into the normative, authoritative, of a Pater Noster. Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Rasa J.


When Lina Lapelytè asked if she could use my novel Living in a Land as the basis for a new choral performance called The Mutes, which had been commissioned by Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, I said ‘yes’ immediately, without asking anything about the project.

I had seen Lina’s song cycle Candy Shop: the Circus several times. I was impressed by how this live show – in which an all-female ensemble reinterprets iconic rap songs by male artists – transforms existing material into something radically different, almost antithetical, to the original authors’ concerns. In the pantheon of unusual covers, her version of 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop” – a folk-cum-sea-shanty take on his 2005 release – is the equal of Devo’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”.

As a composer and re-arranger, Lina has the ability to make the familiar uncanny by using alien time-signatures and unforeseen lyrical scansion, and by filtering contemporary works through melodies that sometimes sound – to my ear – mediaeval.

But what would she do with Living in a Land? Being a fictional memoir by someone who can only construct sentences in the negative, and can thus only tell us what he has never done, no longer does, or will never do, the book is already uncanny, or at least strange. I’m tempted to think, as I look back on the three-hour performance of The Mutes on the opening night of the 22nd June, that Lina has done the reverse of what she achieved with “Candy Shop”: rendered the uncanny familiar.

The Mutes consists of thirteen singers repeating lines and phrases from Living in a Land in a carefully rehearsed fifty-minute cycle, performed six times without a break. Thanks to its long duration, and the difficulty in determining where the cycle begins and ends, lines like ‘I’ve never driven a 7.5 ton truck’, or ‘It is unlikely that I shall ever be invited back to my old school, to show what I have made of myself’ slowly acquire an official-sounding, almost catechistic authority.

By the end of the première, I was hearing my text as if it were the “Lord’s Prayer” (“Our Father”), despite the ultra-mundane quality of the language (which Lina perhaps sees as an anti-libretto). Also adding to this feeling that my words had taken on a peculiar moral weight was fashion designer Egle Cekanaviciute’s thrillingly inscrutable costuming style, which made singers seem to have stepped in from a near future.

And then there were the nettle bushes installed throughout the gallery, around which the performers wandered, pausing to offer solos, sometimes singing in unison. Nettle bushes are, for me, the staple backdrop of a certain kind of childhood recollection: first kisses, egg-collecting, lighting fires, fighting – it all seems to have happened in the nettles, a plant that has since become an instant nostalgia-signifier.

But most telling was the constraint imposed by Lapelytè on her performers: they should have ‘no musical ear’, or, crudely put, should not be able to sing. This constraint echoed the constraint of my book, and it was this that gave my text an unexpectedly universal quality.

Suddenly, my outsider-narrator – my own personal ‘Mute’ – was a bona fide citizen. And the fact that my Mute’s alienated statements were being sung by a whole chorus of Mutes lent them an emotional register that caught me off-guard: the words seemed to issue more directly from their characters than if they had been delivered by virtuoso performers, who might have smothered their content with theatrical professionalism.

But more than this, the cast’s naked, diffident delivery made me realise that we all speak from an alienated perspective, from a sense of separateness from others, from the very world we inhabit, at the same time as coexisting with others, at the same time as being in and of that world.

The transformation of my work in Lina’s The Mutes makes for interesting comparison with other spoken-word extracts from Living in a Land, such as the one I recorded for the journal Inscription in 2020. There’s also my 2018 collaboration with Anat Ben David, “Living C# Minor”, a thirteen-minute composition that sets my voice to a plaintive electronic arrangement, towards the end accompanied by her own voice, in a style that ranges from sung phrases to guttural croaks and shrieks. In Living C# Minor there is a sense of Anat performing behind my back, as though I am unaware of what she is doing that I find just as moving as the collective iteration of the novel at Lafayette.

Perhaps the verbal constraints and repetition in my writing can seem arch and almost painful to the ear when heard only through my voice. But something else happens when other folk get involved. It touches me that musicians and singers should be attracted to a book that, at the time of writing, seemed so despairingly solipsistic, such a doubtful and solitary gambit. I wonder if there will be any takers for Massive Massive Oil Slick, my follow-up to Living in a Land? Massive Massive, in the form of a prophecy, is written solely in sentences that begin with the verbs ‘expect’ and ‘suppose’. Thanks to my experience with Lina’s The Mutes, perhaps I will publish it only so that some other artist can give it its true form.

Sean Ashton

Sean Ashton lives in London and teaches fine art at Leeds Beckett University and the Royal College of Art.  An associate editor at MAP Magazine and an award-winning critic for Art Review, until 2017, Ashton is a contributor ofpoems, essays and stories to publications including Oxford Poetry, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, Magma,Poetry Salzburg Review and Artenol. In addition to Living in a Land (Ma Bibliothèque 2017), Ashton’s fiction includes Sunsets & Dogshits (Alma Books 2008), a collection of reviews of imaginary artwork and Sampler, (Valley Press 2020), entries from an imaginary encyclopaedia written entirely by poets. In 2023, The Way to Work, a fourth literary surprise, will appear with Salt Publishing.

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