Sickness Diary with Anna RG

Sickness Diary - an exploration of chronic illness and disability justice with interdisciplinary artist Anna RG

In this seventh episode of Season 2, Kyla-Rose speaks with artist Anna RG, about her navigation of chronic illness, since contracting COVID in the early days of the pandemic. 

Anna, who lives currently in Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, spent the first chapter of her musical life in communities of Appalachian folk musics, a fiddler, banjo player, and researcher – her duo with ballad singer Elizabeth LaPrelle combined the old songs with storytelling and puppetry. Their collaboration is rooted in a research process, time in archives with old folk song recordings, and interviews with descendents of the singers. The duo’s final album together, The Invisible Comes to Us, drew from songs in field recordings made of European-descended singers in Vermont (land of Abenaki), where Anna grew up. The record, of increasingly experimental arrangements of the ballads, was released on Smithsonian Folkways, and dubbed “A radical expansion of what folk songs are supposed to do,” by The New Yorker.

This conversation took place two years into Anna’s ongoing journey into another community and world, of illness and disability – and a new set of questions about the role of music, and a new awareness about the systemic ways that sick and disabled artists are not as supported as they could be. 

The conversation moves through themes of the particulars of sick grief and experiences of isolation, the challenges and fears uncovered in adapting to a new life, and new musical practice. We speak more broadly, Anna processing her growing understanding of the role of ableism both internal and systemic, and how it shapes possibilities in music performance, practice and education. Inspired by experiences in traditional music, we talk about ideas of music specifically created for the sick, fantasies of bedside concerts, and sick folks as listeners and makers. 

Midway, we follow a short fever dream into one of Anna’s bed-day fantasies, about a center that houses the histories of sick musicians, and dispatches singers to your bed or window. 

Produced and Edited by Kyla-Rose Smith and Anna RG

Mixed by Zubin Hensler

Executive Producers: Elena Moon Park, and Kyla-Rose Smith

Featuring: Anna RG & Sick Center actors Weston Olenecki, Lucia Reissig, Lauren Tosswill, Holly MacDonald, Leticia Ayala, Kaeley Pruitt-Hamm, Nyokabi Kariuki, Daniel Neumann 

A full playlist of songs found in this episode can be found on the Found Sound Nation Youtube

Texts & artists mentioned during this episode: 

• CARE WORK by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
• You Are Not Entitled To Our Deaths: COVID, Abled Supremacy & Interdependence by Mia Mingus
• Carolyn Lazard
• Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag

OneBeat is an initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, & produced by Bang on a Can’s Found Sound Nation.