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First Lingít opera to make its world premiere Friday
‘This is a gift of our culture and our history and our beauty and our tragedy and our fierceness’
By Ellie Ruel
Juneau Independent
After eight and a half years of work, a production reclaiming Lingít epic storytelling through emotional historical accounts of war in Sitka will come to life onstage for the first time Friday.
“Ḵutulagaaw: The Tlingit – Russian Battles” was commissioned by Sealaska Heritage Institute President Rosita Kaaháni Worl to further Lingít voices in Western performing arts, harkening back to ancient forms of oratory and dance performed in natural amphitheaters. Ḵutulagaaw loosely translates to “the war we are in” in Lingít.
“Our vision is to challenge stereotypes that depict Indigenous societies as primitive,” Worl said in an artistic statement. “We want to overcome the historical depictions of a tribal society without laws. We want to humanize Native Peoples and portray the deep feelings we have; that we sing, dance, grieve and battle as do others. We want to show that we acted strategically to allow us to survive in this new world that was engulfing us and that we willingly adapted and embraced elements of Western society.”
Worl enlisted the help of Vera Starbard to write the libretto, or script of the opera at a play opening in 2018, with Perseverance Theatre cosponsoring the production. Lingít language expert X̱’unei Lance Twitchell translated that script.
“She approached me and started talking about what a good idea an opera in Lingít about the Battles of Sitka would be, and it took a couple of those suggestions that someone should do it to realize she was saying, ‘Hey, you should do this,’” Starbard said. “Before the curtain went up opening night, I was texting Ed.”
Ed Littlefield composed the musical element of the opera with orchestrator Rory Stitt. He said that while the opera being entirely sung in Lingít is important, audience members who aren’t fluent will still understand the plot.
“Music is universal. It's heard in every place around the world,” Littlefield said. “We don't always understand it, but we can feel it. And I guarantee you, anyone watching this will feel the performance.”
He said that viewers can pick up Lingít words through the immersive experience.
A storyteller will open each performance with an explanation of the plot and historical context, keeping with Lingít oral traditions, Starbard said. Her words have a more poetic form than most plays since it’s sung and don’t drive the story on their own.
“Every single word in line is a metaphor upon metaphor upon duplicate meanings,” she said.
The opera follows 1802 and 1804 battles between the Lingít in Sitka (Sheey Atiká) and Russian invaders (Anóoshi). The opening scene shows Russian men harassing the Kiks.ádi women and being driven out by allied Lingít clans after violating their laws continuously.
Afterwards, preparations for the Russian return from Kodiak are made — with a great tragedy striking, accentuated by a song describing how women feel the realities of war.
“We build and grow and feed the clan. Strangers take and hurt what we nurture. Women know this anger,” a summary written by Starbard reads.
The audience follows the viewpoint of Tíx’, a female translator between the Lingít and Russians.
“Her job was to watch and to listen, and that just captured me as far as how to tell this story,” she said.
When researching, Starbard said she focused on oral accounts from primarily Lingít sources.
“The funny part about the Russian accounts is every single one of them, especially in Sitka, is like the Sitka Lingíts just sing and sing all the time. They just sing and then they dance and then they sing some more, and they never shut up. They just keep singing,’” she said. “To me, it's such a beautiful punctuation we're like, ‘Yep, and we're still singing. The Sitka Lingíts and all of us are still singing together.’”
Each line Starbard wrote was translated from English into Lingít by Twitchell. Sometimes, it was then retranslated to English to check the meanings.
“Vera wrote the lines that she thought would be in there, and then I took them and translated them into Lingít. And sometimes we would text back and forth about things like, ‘This is something that you really can't say in Lingít,’” Twitchell explained. “Or it's just going to have a different meaning because every language functions differently. So then we would sometimes talk through some of those areas and make adjustments, or I'd see what the intention was behind this because Lingít is also very specific.”
Twitchell said he’s been making tweaks to the translations after hearing them sung in rehearsal.
For Littlefield, whose ancestors fought in the Battles of Sitka, much of the work came in transforming sheets with Starbard’s original lines, Twitchell’s translation and the meaning of the translation into a Lingít song form.
“It's usually just a few notes, just a melody sung. Sometimes chants can be only one note and just words in a rhythm,” he said. “So expanding on that was really fun, and so there's a natural harmony that goes with those notes. But what I tried to do and what I've been trying to do for almost 20 years now, is take those melodies, the melodies I have permission to use, and changing those key centers to evoke a different emotion.”
Littlefield said he spent hours in his studio, trying to sing the lines and come up with a harmony that made sense. Most operas lean heavily on arias filled with “oh” and “ah” notes, but Littlefield honed in on Lingít consonants and rhythms.
“One of the limitations for this is that we didn't really have a lot of fast words speaking, so if I truly kept the traditional style, it would be like a five or six hour opera because we would have to sing it in that style. So my favorite part was trying to fit all these words into a specific rhythm,” he said. “They were very basic compositions with a chord outlining a groove, a rhythm.”
From there, Stitt orchestrated the compositions. Stitt said they tried to give the pieces texture and substance without completely adhering to the restrictions of Western opera music.
“I think we struck a really great balance of the Western traditional sounds without barreling over or erasing the edges of those Lingít music and language, and try to come up from underneath it I think and support it,” Stitt said. “Not overly harmonized, not overly decorated, but try to stay really true to the pureness of the language rhythm, and that Lingít music is drum and voice.”
Stitt drew on musical tropes, like snare drums and horns indicating a military theme, to support the drumming and language and expand the harmony without overrunning cultural elements. Stitt and Littlefield settled on wooden sounds like the glockenspiel as complementary to the language.
“If I was ever stuck on something, I'd be like, ‘Well, are you supporting the drum or the voice here?’” Stitt said. “It's got to go one of these two directions. If it doesn't serve that, then it doesn't serve the format of the storytelling that's just the format of the piece that serves the nature of the art that it's trying to uplift.”
For Stitt, the opera was an opportunity to apply musical knowledge in a new way.
“I've spent most of my life studying classical music and working in that idiom,” Stitt said. “It's just been a huge gift to be able to bring that knowledge in service of furthering the culture and the language.”
Starbard noted the opera is also musically unique since the performers are not statically placed onstage.
“My husband and I in the early research phase went to an unnamed opera, that very historical Western opera, and they stood and they sang and they stood and they sang, and that was it. They just didn't move, and what we left there with was like, ‘Well, that's not Lingít Opera. We're still creating what Lingít Opera is, but Lingít performance is so much movement,” Starbard said. “We'd always planned for there to be just dancers too that are in movement.”
Of the 20 cast members, multiple are Lingít dancers, and much of the story’s context is given through movement.
“I actually feel like some of the most emotional beats in the story are when you're watching it, it's still a surprise because they're not hyper literal,” director Madeline Sayet explained. “They're danced and the music is really emotional in those sections.”
Starbard said it was an emotional account of the Battles of Sitka, rather than a purely historical one, allowing for room between the literal details to capture the emotional journey.
Sayet said the format could act as a blueprint for other cultures, including her own. Her mother is a Mohegan historian culture-bearer, and was inspired to write plays to help people remember and understand history.
“That's also just like a really exciting precedent for more groups of people coming together and telling their stories in their languages in different artistic forms,” she said.
Encouraging others to take Lingít culture into new realms in an Indigenous-led way is a goal of the production, Twitchell said.
“I think we've been sort of duped into not telling our own stories by living under this sort of idea that only a single clan can tell a particular story, which in some cases, like it is their story, it's their people. But in other cases, it affects so many of us. And when we come down to who can tell stories in Lingít now, like you can count them on one hand,” he said. “We've seen people tell these stories who are not Indigenous, and I think it's better for us to tell our own stories.”
Starbard said the opera highlights Lingít strength, and shares fierceness, beauty, tragedy, culture and history.
“I thought it was an amazing story to be able to tell something that speaks to the strength of an Indigenous culture,” she said. “Too often, what you see on stage in other media is the weakness or the loss of Indigenous culture, and in this case, it was all about the fight and the success and the triumph of our culture.”
Littlefield hopes the opera inspires more Lingít works.
“These objects and these songs and stories are beautiful, but they're also there for a reason,” he said. “I want people to sing these melodies, you know, and have them come out with new Lingít works and new ideas. Lingít people are so creative, and I just want to kind of open that box to new creativity on how we share our culture on our terms.”
“Ḵutulagaaw: The Tlingit – Russian Battles” will open at the Thunder Mountain Middle School Auditorium on Friday at 7:30 p.m., and will run until Sept. 20. Tickets are available online.
• Contact Ellie Ruel at ellie.ruel@juneauindependent.com.
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