"Disappearance"
Text and Music by Kristin Norderval
Performed by Kristin Norderval
Inspired by Walt Whitman’s I Sing the Body Electric

And then the disappearance of
countless embodiments, enjoyments.
The twisting of words and memory
When a body no longer faces us with its
fierce undeniable attractions
We make of it what we will.
Idiots become wise, the poor rich, slaves free,
The addict interred as whole,
The unclaimed child mute, invisible,
The lesbian aunt, the queer son subsumed
back into the nuclear familial past,
history and lives erased,
irritating details smoothed to indistinction.
The procession folding in on itself
The ‘disappeared’ disappeared here
in the void, in the spaces, in the silence

NOTES:
I wrote this piece as part of a larger collaboration in Copenhagen at Den Anden Opera in March, 2004. This particular solo piece was a response to several instances of appropriation and disappearance, both political, personal and artistic that confronted me once again with the question “whose stories do we tell?”.
I was reading Diana Taylor’s Disappearing Acts : Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War”, and at the same time experiencing signs of rising nationalism and racism in Denmark that were disturbing to me. By day the Royal Drum Corps would parade through the streets, clearing pedestrians and traffic with their martial music. The sight and sound of this entirely white corps in their military uniforms, practicing for an upcoming royal wedding and inscribing ‘old Denmark’ gave me chills. By night gangs of young white Danish men would echo that parade – clearing the streets again with their drunken group chants and verbal taunts of women, minorities and whoever else they wanted to harass. The response of local people when I asked them about this custom was that this was a normal way for young men to blow off steam, that it didn’t mean anything. The locals also didn’t seem to be disturbed by the general lack of interaction between the white Danish population and the immigrant communities, nor were they disturbed by advertisements and illustrations in the papers that I found racist and offensive. One of the clearest examples was the illustration for an article in a mainstream paper on how the deportment of prisoners should determine their privileges. It used a drawing of a fair-haired clean shaven white male complete with halo to illustrate good behavior and used drawings of progressively darker and more hirsute males to illustrate bad behavior.
I was surprised by the lack of political awareness among my collaborators on issues of artistic appropriation. Walt Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric” had been chosen as one of the source-texts and inspirations for the larger piece, however the portions of the poem that they had chosen to set to music completely erased any sense of that poem as a critique of racial or class prejudice. In fact it erased all references to race in general. In addition this work by one of America’s queer icons had been appropriated into a heterosexually-centered stereotypical description of male and female and a paean to essentialist motherhood. Although race, gender and sexuality are issues that are as potent in Denmark as anywhere else, there was resistance to exploring the connection of Whitman’s poem to these issues played out locally and resentment at discussing how appropriation of his work in this way undercut and distorted its original meaning. I felt that I was experiencing firsthand how the meanings of artwork become subverted to the norms and narratives of the dominant group even in the face of resistance to it.
One evening I visited a friend in Copenhagen who recounted the experience of a mutual colleague of ours, Margaret, who had nursed her lover through the last stages of Lou Gherrig’s disease. After her lover’s death, following her last wishes, she had taken the body back to Prague to be buried at a family burial site. A small group of her lesbian friends accompanied her, among them my friend from Copenhagen. She described how the priest had given a long eulogy at the graveside, but that neither he nor the family made one mention of Margaret’s role in her lover’s life or her round the clock caretaking for the last two years, even though Margaret was standing right beside them. That night, with a fragment of Whitman in my mind – “fierce undeniable attraction” - which I quote in the poem, the following text came to me and the music followed in the days afterwards. The metallic sounds in the piece are soundfiles which I had previously recorded of on my own footsteps and other soundings on a spiral metal staircase in an abandoned silo in Norway. The other sources of the sound material are computer manipulations of my voice.