Project title: Queer Idyll
Hometown: Greer, South Carolina
Project description: Today's mainstream queer celebrations get taken for granted so much that visibility, access, community, solidarity, and understanding of queer identity easily become overlooked by cisgender and heteronormative audiences. Furthermore, queer history often focuses on metronormativity, neglecting rural queer living and its ability to collectively celebrate. Solely acknowledging queer people through urban perspectives suggests rural queerness cannot thrive in its home communities. To address these concerns, I introduce Queer Idyll: a musical film that envisages a marriage between the sonic and visual worlds to document the Queer Farmer Network's goal of acknowledging, supporting, and building communities among queer, rural communities. To intimately understand queer agriculture, I am visiting various farms run by queer people and working as a farmhand during my stays. I will weave together interviews and sound recordings from these surrounding environments on site to evoke the essence of living queer in rural America. This revelatory project exposes the complicated nature of queer existence and the banality of everyday life through queer, avant-garde methodologies. Juxtaposing joyful tranquility against intrapersonal distress, the film inquires into the affective expressions of idyllic isolation, social deprivation, and the processes of communal renewal to the captured lived realities behind rural queer life. Antinormative art flirts with failure, sometimes even provoking it despite the chance of not being taken seriously. This Senior Fellowship adopts these risks to address the problems of today, in my case: the Queer Idyll.
Extracurricular activities: I perform in several instrumental ensembles! One of my favorite groups is the Dartmouth College Wind Ensemble (DCWE). The DCWE allows me to continue my passion for wind band music, and I went on tour in Mexico with the ensemble. Additionally, I am a member of the Contemporary Music Lab, a small group that focuses on exploring how structured improvisation and modern musical notations create soundscapes. This group introduced me to how exploring sound can be music, something that is heavily integrated into my project. Recently, I have received an opportunity to teach music lessons to an elementary schooler as a member of Musical Empowerment. Outside of the musical community, I am the president of the Zeta Psi fraternity on campus, enjoy working on student short films, and blog for the admissions office.
Future plans: After graduation, I intend to apply for master degrees in music composition or musicology. The goal from a continued education attempts to generate ways for how music can be created for wide audiences in approachable formats. I hope to simultaneously push boundaries within music composition and expand possibilities. Additionally, I hope to begin teaching and writing about music to share how musical communities can access and freely interact with music.
