"Babel" speaks in tongues; sparks the imagination
Martha Whittington and June Young (Will) Kim's collaboration with ensemble vim explores communication from its origin to its terminus as part of SPARK's 2024-2025 grand finale.
SPARK Festival: Origin | Terminus
ensemble vim (very interesting music)
Martha Whittington, sculptor & June Young (Will) Kim, composer
“Babel” culminating performance | February 10th, 2025
“One artwork begets another.”
That’s what ensemble vim member and cellist Laura Usiskin says of the artistic and musical collaborations that comprise the SPARK Festival’s mission. I learned about the festival’s finale from my friend Martha Whittington, an Atlanta-based sculptor and teacher whose work I think of as meticulously utilitarian, stunning for her rendering of detail. She had collaborated with highly-trained, emerging composer June Young (Will) Kim, currently studying in Germany, and who I would come to know as an unassuming, friendly email correspondent in the few weeks following this performance. Martha and Will were one of three duos given the resources to collaborate for about nine months around the theme of Origin | Terminus.
Their work emerged organically from conversations over several months (thank God for Zoom!)— talks which ignited a spark — that resulted in “Babel”. Will had been reading Power of Babel by Columbia University linguist John McWhorter, in which the author asserts that we all spoke the same language before migration lead us to “fracture and transform.” As Will and Martha talked, it occurred to them that the generative nature of language resonated with SPARK’s 2024-2025 theme related to beginnings and endings. As they began working on their individual elements of the piece, members of ensemble vim would periodically check in, too; as performers after all, they would bring the whole piece to life as interpreters of this three-part collaboration.
And while Babel, the tower of myth, signifies garbled communication, the end result as it was performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA) could not have been more technically cohesive. Yes, it helped when Martha introduced the broad concepts of the piece before the performance began, but it was fun to try to fill in some interpretive gaps as I took in the whole scene before me. Martha revealed that the perfect circle, hewn in cherry, and encompassing the piano could be thought of as a portal. The red throughout the set, she told me later, could signify warning, action, and emergence. The backdrop of an incomplete circle might be the setting sun, and the towers or pedestals of varying heights might be watchtowers. Small circles on the towers that to me represented semaphore signals, she said, could act like phonics, linking various parts of the stage. And the performers were all barefoot, she told us, to make them grounded. In other words, there was a lot of communication going on. The ambiguity was intriguing; it was up to the audience/spectator/listener to stitch together meaning for themselves.
The symbology continued with a long, carefully crafted pole bearing a red flag, perhaps from a ship’s deck, that transected much of the space. I pictured someone waving the signal, asking for help, sending a life sign. Three brass spheres — almost bollards — demarcated a cordoned-off space at the back of the performance area, behind which played Bob Anemone, the violinist. (I would spot him on stage at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra two weeks later.) I would also notice later in watching a video from the dress rehearsal — embedded at the end of this essay — that in the shiny surface of the spheres were reflected the performers, their bows dancing wildly in the brassy light.
What I love most about Martha’s work is that she provides the form while we fill in the function.
During the other two performances that evening, the set for “Babel” provided a logistical challenge for viewers and the artist alike. While we had been invited to walk on the red carpet, we were also advised “not to touch the art.” I noted the ambiguity in that warning, and I got nervous when other gallery goers accidentally bumped the flagpole or intentionally sat upon the columns, much to Martha’s chagrin. Did those offenders not know what art was? In these charged moments, none of us were communicating very well. We were creating a tense Happening.
Then the quartet occupied the four corners of the space, the audience safely out of harm’s way. Before they began to perform, we heard a disembodied voice of the composer over the tinny speakers. I couldn’t hear very well, but I learned that Will couldn’t get in to the United States due to a bureaucratic glitch related to his green card. My stomach lurched a bit. I told myself a story that probably wasn’t absolutely correct, but can I be blamed (these days) for being worried? I think my anxiety spilled into my experience of the performance.
As the performance began, I took a spot on the floor very close to the piano, at kind of a funny angle, but a great perspective. I quietly put my Modelo on the concrete floor, hoping not to contribute percussion of my own. The music called for cacophony. The pianist, Choo Choo Hu, very often juxtaposed music on the keys and on the strings themselves, strumming and even hitting, transforming the grand into a badly abused harp. Later on the video I would see that Choo Choo would pause briefly to change the tuning of the strings with a brass tuner’s key, offering a surreptitious modulation. The violin and cello relied on pizzicato, their sounds also punching the air with anguish, pain, and sometimes humor.
During the performance, I tried to piece together strands of information from the set itself. Did the semaphore-looking circles (half red, half gold) match or relate to the other? Or did the larger, solid-red circles go with the setting sun on the wall? Did they somehow send signals to the bollards over in the far corner? Were the red sun and flag telling us something? If we were on a ship, for where were we bound?
Was I, perhaps, thinking too hard? Or simply trying to make sense of my captivating surroundings? I felt anchored, yet unmoored.
I noticed as the piece progressed that the musicians started to engage differently, almost as if they were listening to each other for a new kind of connection. At one point the whole ensemble, though playing dissonant notes, would join in a new kind of unison. They’d land on a note and stay there for several measures as if trying to parse out a new harmony. Several measures of silence would follow, allowing us to create our own meaning in that space, to take in the sounds of the gallery, to shift on our feet or re-cross our legs.
One of my favorite moments of this attempted convergence was toward the end of the piece when the pianist expressed a somewhat violent outburst on the keyboard and piano strings. The flutist, Nicole Frankel, peering down from her stance on the taller column near the piano, paused and stared for a moment before responding with her own highly punctuated, airy response. We were witnessing a lively, dynamic conversation.
What was expressed in that exchange? Or in all the other moments of attempted or missed connections?
It’s hard to know, and that’s fine. To me, the creators and performers of “Babel” give us a stage — environment, really — in which we can explore the very nature of inference. Whatever hunches and guesses we make, as Martha puts it, whether “we have a feeling of understanding and not understanding….we are fundamentally the same.”
The beauty of “Babel” is that it demonstrates our sameness, but also our individuality. With such a tightly orchestrated gestalt — the unity of music, set, artist, composer, performers, and audience — we are able to know that we are the same, but we migrate — from origin to terminus, from genesis to revelation.