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Divide Light

By Lesley Dill on FRI, APR 18TH 2008, NOON

In her own words....Lesley Dill (creator of Divide Light)

Sense inside the sound, sound inside the sense...

In writing music for Divide Light, we walk carefully between interpreting the austerity of language with too little passion and interpreting the depth of the emotion with sentimental sincerity. Within the complicated syntax of the poetry, double negatives often take the place of simple statement. Dickinson's blunt assertions are usually dualistic – the darkness is dark, but also light (“I see thee better in the dark”); the lightness is light but also dangerous (“crisis is a hair toward which the forces creep”). The multi-focused possibility of emotional destination is sprinkled throughout the language. Crisis and impact are in an instant, but the resonance of mystery lingers.

Her words are not necessarily holders/reliquaries of accepted meaning. There’s often a feeling of unknown boundaries of intent and this intention is often revealed in juxtaposition - "arid pleasure," "how ruthless are the gentle," "the infinite a sudden guest," "the life that tied too tight escapes."  

And when the language aims for meaning, it hits it with a bullet — "I like a look of agony because I know it’s true"..."To be alive is power."

The atmosphere of Dickinson’s poetry in general is one of theatrical interiority ("much madness is divinest sense"). Dickinson establishes an emotional space that is more of a verb than a noun - acerbic, fragmentary, this metaphorical setting tips and moves ("an instant’s push demolishes/a questioning dissolves") like a spinning stage set where chairs and actors intersperse.

Passionate, abrupt, irrational — the language skews one into the mysterious. The feeling of evanescence sets up a desire for some transcendent truth. It is about mystery rather than display/purity rather than overstatement. There is deep passion in relation to big, dark, small, light, grieving and celebratory emotions. Usually each emotion is linguistically parsed until it reveals a seed of a contradictory emotion. The shadow is definitely breathed, but with such an embedded vitality ("doom is the house without a door," "for each ecstatic instant we must an anguish pay") that it moves one to recognition and empathy rather than depression and despair.

In our opera, the performers will move through this trajectory of the sublime, which is present in the bath of emotions we live in every day. It is an opera of precision of the heart.