Hallelujah: Audio Poem

Artist Statement

"Hallelujah" explores embodiment, faith, death, and parenthood. Specifically, it holds in tension the beautiful aspects of childbirth, learning to love your body, and childhood wonder, with the grotesque reality that your body and your children's bodies will one day die. The poem seeks to find, through faith, an acceptance of death as merely a fact and not a point of obsession or fear. The audio piece combines original recordings with manipulated samples that conjure these topics (ex: a clip from "Taps" suggesting grief and mourning) and reflect how anxiety and obsessiveness can create feelings of the uncanny and haunted surrounding beautiful subjects, like birth. Ultimately, the audio piece aims to portray the distress of someone preoccupied by her eventual death and the eventual deaths of those she loves most in the world, before landing on a peaceful acceptance that it is possible to move beyond these fears into a life of loving relationship and gratitude.

Beverley Sylvester is a writer, composer, dramaturg, and musician. Her work is often rooted in the Southern Gothic genre where she interrogates the sticky, uncomfortable, and lovely relationships we have to death and dying, sexuality, spirituality, race, love, earth, politics, gender, rot, and embodiment in the American Deep South. Her writing has received the Artistine Mann Award in Playwriting, the New South Young Playwrights Award, and publication in Yellow Arrow Journal, among other recognitions. You can find her on Instagram at @bsylvester_arts or at bfsylvester.com.