An Interview With Lady Xøk
Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra, known as Lady Xøk is a multi-disciplinary artist, dancer, theater maker, and puppet creator. Lady Xøk spoke with Cedar Commissions program manager, Robert Lehmann, about her Salvadoran, Lenca, and Norwegian roots; finding her genre(s); and incorporating different Indigenous instruments into her work.
You can hear Lady Xøk live during our Cedar Commissions Concert on Saturday February 10th
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RL: How would you describe your roots, whatever that means to you?
Most of my life I've identified as a biracial person, Norwegian and Salvadoran, and as a daughter of a refugee. Not having a lot of access to my indigenous culture, I found different ways to engage in cultural traditions. But in adulthood, especially after I got pregnant and felt this impulse to pass on everything I can to the next generation, I'm now much stronger in my identity and mostly identify as being a Lenca person and enrolled tribal citizen of my Lenca nation, and still hold true and strong to Nordic roots.
RL: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself as an artist?
Well, I work pretty much as an interdisciplinary artist, and so, as a musician I still always have visuals and sometimes incorporate movement or dance; I also work in theater and try to think about my work as experimental storytelling. It’s a way I can capture and transmit traditional storytelling but for a non-traditional intertribal wide audience, mixing in personal narrative as well.
There's a lot of musicians in my family – in fact, it was one of the first things that my dad and my uncles did when they left the war in El Salvador. They stopped in Mexico and they recorded an album that was about the war in El Salvador and a critique of the U.S. involvement in that Civil War. So pretty immediately I've had a strong mood of music in my family and in my own creative creativity but only got serious about it within the last ten years where I felt like music was the main thing that I get excited about, or that I wanted to be the backbone of the creative work I do.
RL: Can you tell us a little bit about your Cedar Commissions work?
It’s in response to some processing I've been doing over the past five years and in particular thinking about a time after a show where somebody came up and said they wanted they wanted to see more indigenous, instruments, or language. I was excited that somebody else would want that, because that I was afraid that I might turn off people who are potential audience members. It's a really intentional response to try to incorporate more indigenous instruments and country rhythms that have a very mixed cultural history.
For example, I've been studying the Sacabuche drum for a while now, which there aren't too many of anymore in Central America. It's a resistance drum. People might recognize that kind of a sound as a Brazilian sound. But this style of drum is also used in jam making ceremonies in Sephardic regions like in Spain, and other African, or African-influenced Latin American countries. Then there are also drums that are depicted in old Maya iconography and epigraphy, and so I’ve been investigating the deep cultural roots of this drum that come together in this part of the region where we extended out in all directions because of our place on the ocean currents. I have a strong curiosity to know more about how deep these intertribal extensions of friendship go through this drum.
But I'm also exploring blues, jazz, and country. I'm thinking about that ambient soundscape that is felt throughout much country and blues, traditional folk music – the sounds of sitting on the porch. Even the sample that I gave when I applied for the commissions was on my Grandma's farm porch. I like to incorporate natural soundscape, and not necessarily having a clear beginning and end of a song but an overall storytelling experience that includes nature as part of the soundscape, as the composer – as a collaborator.
I’m also exploring traditional Central American dance rhythms, listening to things like Garifuna music, and also taking Mexican folkloric dancing (which are very colonial rhythms) and trying to parse out like what what of the countryside rhythms of my family are where they lean, so I can better understand the history of Lenca music in our region.
RL: This is a big project. There's so much depth that you can get into. I was talking with Sarah Larsson, and she was talking about seeing the Cedar Commissions as both a full performance to do really well – the best that you can, but also thinking about it as a seed. For her she's already starting to think about what she’s going to do with this ensemble, where she plans to tour, and looking forward to sharing that music out more.
I often struggle with what box I fit in. What’s the genre? If it's solo work, or group work, it’s something I always find difficult. I've been playing with a requinto handed down to me, and it has this great country blues sound and it's just so fun to play for boleros, and it's one part of my sound. What is the intersection? My music is a reflection of who I am culturally and I hope that it resonates with other people, who are mixed, or who have been displaced and find themselves with many different cultural influences.
RL: I feel that. I was talking with my sister last night, and it's just funny for me whenever I'm in Arabic spaces. I fit in so much more than I do in spaces with my family members at a big Filipino gathering or when I go to the Philippines. It's funny – the people that I look like, I actually don't share any ancestral culture with them. I’ve come to realize that the spaces where I do feel more like I belong are less culturally homogenous – spaces where individuals bring several different cultural identities.
There’s this book I have right here called Co-Madres by Heider Tun Tun, and it's about the Civil War in El Salvador, and some nuns who were organizing resistance. I broke down sobbing when I opened it the other night because there are really graphic pictures of bodies lined up and it’s easy to forget as first- or second-generation in the U.S. of what people have fled. I know that my dad, my grandma, and my uncles, they all have trauma, but seeing these very graphic pictures reminded me of the privilege and the responsibility I have. They are still scared in many deep ways, amd they're very much still hesitant to embrace their indigeneity. It takes a long time to interview them because we're wading through that fear and anxiety. I am so privileged that I didn't have to witness that violence, but I get to reclaim and celebrate our old traditions from before that violence.
RL: What you’ve described feels very relevant in terms of seeing vicious displacements of Palestinians by Israeli settlers as part of the ongoing horrific genocide. It's made me feel my own ancestry in different ways. I’ve heard my Lolo’s stories for decades and yet, I’ve only begun to really understand in my body the stories of my Lolo fleeing his village in World War II as the Japanese invaded and razed it to the ground, or his father being executed for being a guerrilla soldier resisting the invasion on the Northern coast. I've heard these stories so many times, but seeing the gruesome images from today – every day – it’s drilled home that trauma they went through, and I’m understanding it in a different way in my body
Like you said, it's hard to go there. My Lola doesn't want to go there at all, and my Lolo will talk about it, but the more that he's talked about it, the more he breaks down these days. He used to just talk about it and would say how he was really sad about his father passing away, but wouldn't have emotional expression tied to it. More recently, the more that he's dug into it, he understands that it's the re-surfacing of the trauma, and his emotions swell.
Thinking about ancestry and colonial violence – I just want to give some joy back, you know. No matter what, I still have this blues sound that comes out even if I try to do something else, so it exists in our cellular DNA. Or maybe it's my other experiences that influence that, but with this project, I want to try to create some music that has joy in it that claims some of those old rhythms in hopefully a new and inspired traditional way.
RL: It’s a beautiful vision. Could you talk about your process?
I've been listening to a lot of different styles of traditional music just to know what my music is not, and I've been taking folkloric dance classes too, also mostly to know what it's not. I keep having this curiosity – what am I doing? I don't know what it is, and I keep asking people what they think it is, and nobody can tell me. And I’m finally embracing that maybe I don't fit into a particular box. I'm learning to be okay with that, through this Cedar process.
And I’ve been playing with different instruments, intentionally. Playing more requinto, which is not my nicest guitar. Playing the instruments that are more natural, or tapping out drum rhythms on a coffee can because it has a nice found-object, tinny sound that is something I would hear where my family lives in El Salvador. Thinking of rhythms that are working rhythms, of people hammering out metal, and then I'm also collaborating with my music partner and husband to compose some cumbias and dance rhythms. Even though we're both Latinx people, we approach those same rhythms in a much different way. And thinking about how we could fill out different rhythms through looping or by incorporating more collaborators, or pre-production.
RL: What are the other ways that you've grown during this Commissions process? One of the things that you had brought up was slowly feeling like you can just make music and not need to try to figure out what genre it is.
That's a big one, and was the main question I asked in my proposal for the project – and also to the cohort the first time we met. And I've definitely heard from people that, it sounds like blues and I've been describing it as Indigenous blues jazz. I guess that's accurate, so I'm gonna just embrace that that's what I'm doing. And, I've let go of some fear, and limitations about working so much in an interdisciplinary way, working through limitations I was creating for myself around whether I'm making work as a solo musician or as a group. I’m thinking of composing experiences in the way that I have been doing all along, but bringing more awareness about my own creative process. That if I approach it as “I am a storyteller,” then I can carve out those moments when it's just me, doing a bolero, or shifting into a rhythm with lots of collaborators.
RL: What are you looking forward to sharing with audiences for the first time?
I'm excited to share some more rhythmic music, and especially the sacabuche. In a show I did maybe a year ago, I had incorporated a, [23:02]. But I made it specifically, to perform for that show, and even though it might seem like making the sacabuche drum for this show is a one-off instrument, it really is important. It's waking up these sounds and traditions that we're losing. And I hope, even if I don't continue them, other people might be inspired and say “Hey, what is that instrument?” that there's a record of it and some inspiration to reawaken those instruments
RL: It makes me think of what you were saying earlier with thinking about the joy and opportunity of not being in the same challenging situations as some of our ancestors. Of course there's the trauma, there's the uprooting, but then there's also the joy of diving back in.
I look museum collections, and archaeological and anthropological collections, and they just sit there and don't have people to engage them – they’re lonely. We just did a smudging of some collections at a museum on the Solstice the other day. I’s important to me that I'm helping to practice living traditions and create new ways of storytelling, for contemporary indigenous Lencas living in the United States, in the global diaspora. And for me, in particular, as a storykeeper and as a musician, I'm also sharing experiences as a Norwegian, and you know dealing with settler colonialism, and indigeneity, and spiritual conflict. There’s a person with clergy in my family and I think about themes of suffering and liberation.
RL: It’s all mixed. You were talking about sonically what audiences can expect; what should they expect visually?
I’ve made a lot of projections that are short films of things that inspire me – a lot of the elements, and also stop motion and puppetry. We’ll be adding some new animations, and that's all I know or can share at this point.
RL: What else do you want your audiences to know?
Even if I think I'm doing something one way, it might turn out totally different, so please come and see it.
RL: RZ's response to that question was similar, “Come through; pull up for the show. You’re not gonna know what it is until you get there.”
Right. I really am interested in ritual with the audience, and this is part of the reason why I didn't do a lot of work during the pandemic. So I’m so excited for this opportunity and really want to be able to share it with people in the room, and to be able to share it with the other artists on stage, their audience, and their people – it’ll be special, the kind of creative dialogue we can exchange in that space.
Catch Lady Xøk’s performance of “Olonguayu Toni Mulauna” (I Still Have Medicine) premiering live at The Cedar on Saturday, February 10th as part of the Thirteenth Annual Cedar Commissions.
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The Cedar Commissions is made possible in part by a grant from The Jerome Foundation.
