Anna & Elizabeth Play NYC on April 25th As Part Of Special Shadow Ballads Collaboration

Courtesy: Hearth Music

(PR) During a weeklong mini-tour this spring, Anna & Elizabeth will present their special Shadow Ballads collaboration throughout the East Coast, including a show in New York, NY on April 25 at NYC Consulate of Indonesia.  Shadow Ballads is a special event that brings together leading performers of Appalachian and Asian music and theater to relate shared experiences of everyday life. Master artists from Virginia and Indonesia will combine “crankies,” a form of American folk theater depicting ballads on paper and cloth rolls, with “wayang kulit,” a traditional form of Asian shadow puppetry.

A collaboration between Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth Laprelle, Anna & Elizabeth's growing acclaim springs from a shared quartet of talents: Both are historians, storytellers, visual artists, and gifted, intuitive musicians—in combination, a groundbreaking approach.

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​Inspired by the richness and tradition of the music, Anna & Elizabeth gather songs and stories from archives and visits with elders. They bring these songs to life in performance with sparse, atmospheric arrangements using guitar, banjo, fiddle, and the uncanny blend of their voices in close harmony. They accompany their songs with stories—of the lyrics, of the singer, of the quest to learn the song—and they illustrate them in mesmerizing fashion. The two revive the old scrolling picture show, dubbed  “crankies”—intricate picture-scrolls illustrating the old songs they sing, which they create in tandem with papercuts, shadow puppets, prints, and embroidered fabric.

Anna & Elizabeth met in 2011, and their work has brought them to stages across the world, including the Atlanta Museum of Modern Art; folk festivals in Brooklyn, the Yukon, Chicago, Maine, and Uzbekistan; residencies at universities; summer traditional music schools; and small theaters and folk clubs across the U.S. and U.K.

Their second album, which features Grammy nominee and legendary folk singer Alice Gerrard, was released March 2015 on Free Dirt Records. It has been featured on Vice’s Noisey, the Huffington Post, No Depression, and NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concert series.

This winter, Anna & Elizabeth are beginning a new cycle of work, inspired by ballad singers of the 1930s and 1940s in Vermont and Virginia—the states where they grew up. Spending time in archives, with the families of these singers, and with a director, Anna & Elizabeth with explore connections between place and tradition to develop a new show, a new set of crankies, and a new album inspired by these ballads.