Melliot: ANCESTORS
“Our fascination with Ghost Story began with our own experiences in queer, interracial relationships and the uncanny feeling of embodying a past that we were not present for.”
Summer II 2024 Artists-in-Residence at Clark Chateau.
Composer Elliot Valentine and Lyricist Mel Hornyak (working under the artist name, Melliot) at the Clark Chateau in Butte, MT.
What role does place play in your work?
We enjoy creating work inspired by the place it was created, and the communities who will get to see it first! Our last show, Adamandi, was a dark academia horror musical partly inspired by the distance between the beauty of twentieth-century Ivy League campuses and the punishing competition and systemic injustice taking place within them. Likewise, with Ghost Story, we were very excited to work on a show that drew from our specific communities (Polish and Chinese immigrants) and draw inspiration from our residency in Butte, which dramatically shaped the way we were thinking about the show and its characters. We also highly valued the opportunity to present our work to the people of Butte during our residency, as hearing what they connected to and were excited by within our story was a great privilege. We really enjoy the feeling of crafting a piece of theater around place, and reaching across different communities to show people performances that were crafted for them.
Ghost Story programs, created at the Imagine Butte Resource Center Community Printmaking Studio with the help of their staff.
Can you break down the decisions behind a specific work from your residency, from the initial concept to the final details?
Our fascination with Ghost Story began with our own experiences in queer, interracial relationships and the uncanny feeling of embodying a past that we were not present for. Interracial, queer, and trans relationships are burdened with historical resonances, often against the will of the lovers themselves, and call up questions of fetishization, exoticization, and self-abjection. We realized we were uncomfortable with asking questions about where desire comes from, how to find joy when the majority of queer history ends in tragedy, and whether our ancestors’ identities would have mapped onto our own. This realization led us to queer and race theory, particularly Stranger Intimacy by Nayan Shah and A View From The Bottom by Nguyen Tan Hoang, which discuss queer interethnic intimacies between working-class men in the Pacific Northwest and the experiences of Asian bottoms in the gay dating scene, respectively. These books inspired the plot of Ghost Story, in which a modern-day couple wants to find meaning in their literal/metaphorical ancestors but are not prepared to confront the ugly, tragic, and ambiguous when they find it.
As part of this project, we also wanted to write something a bit closer to our own identities than our other projects, so we focused on the history of Chinese American and Polish American communities, respectively. We also knew we wanted our Polish American character to have traveled out from the East Coast via Polish American enclaves in the Midwest and Chicago, and knew that our Chinese American character would likely have arrived through Angel Island on the West Coast. So, while Stranger Intimacy explored the Pacific Northwest, we looked into other historic Chinese American communities in rural settings across America to see if there was a place our characters could feasibly meet. All of these factors led us to Montana, and then eventually, the Open AIR residency.
Melliot working on Ghost Story.
Describe your Open AIR Residency experience.
Our Open AIR residency in Butte was a perfect fit for our new musical Ghost Story, in which characters from the past and the present share the same space, haunting and helping one another in turn. Living in a town steeped in history helped immerse us in physicalizing the history around the present: the way that a place and the remnants of its everyday use can make the past feel closer to the present, the difficulty in honoring both the difficult and joyful aspects of our heritage without simplifying it, and the vibrancy of modern-day Butte living within, around, and between representations of its past.
A photo of old spices and apothecary supplies from the Mai Wah Society in downtown Butte.
How did you spend your time, construct your space, or engage with the community during your time in Butte?
During our time at Open AIR, we spent our days working at the gorgeous pianos and spaces of the Historic Clark Chateau, writing five new songs for our show, rewriting some other songs, and reading and re-writing book scenes as we incorporated our research.
We also explored the town, using the resources in Butte to make our own connections to Montana’s past. We tracked down maps, immigration records, and old newspapers in the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, looked at the packaging for teas at the Mai Wah Society, and listened to the international stylings of the Folk Festival.
Ghost Story follows a modern-day couple and a couple from 1882 sharing the same Montana ranch house. Our modern-day characters research their 1882 counterparts, imagining how these mirrors of their queer immigrant identities would manifest a century earlier. Tracing the remnants of Butte’s history allowed us to both imagine the remnants our characters were constructing their histories out of and understand the personal experience of site-based research. What does the past illuminate for the present, and what do present-day researchers make up to fill in the gaps of the past? Whose stories get written down and preserved, and how can we still honor the memory and reconstruct the lives of those who didn’t? Ghost Story explores the many emotions that accompany attempts to derive meaning from a place (or a body, or a relationship) while still living in it.
A clipping about “Jimmy July” from the Anaconda Standard, found at the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives.
One example is a song we wrote during the residency, inspired by a historical figure we found in the Butte Silver-Bow archives named “Jimmy July.” As we dug into the complicated history of Chinese Americans in Butte, where a once-thriving Chinatown now lives through a museum and a historic noodle parlor (the Mai Wah Society), we turned to the extensive newspaper collection in the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives to see how Chinese Americans were discussed in 1882. What we discovered was the vibrant life of Jimmy July, cataloged for decades across hundreds of newspaper clippings in Butte. As a colorful drifter and a cultural oddity, Jimmy appeared in lots of local news stories about his love life, run-ins with the law, and his reactions to the laws and policies that targeted Chinese people in Montana. As he struggled to be seen as a “real American,” his adoption of Western dress and customs led him to be exiled from both the Chinese and White communities in Butte. Many newspapers reported on his “friendless” fate at his funeral, at which (according to them) there was not a single attendee.
The team for Melliot’s presentation of Ghost Story at the Historic Clark Chateau. From left to right: Essynce Nixon (stage directions), Mel Hornyak (lyricist, librettist), Elliot Valentine (composer, librettist), Lana Gaige (actor), Seung Choi (actor), Frankee Angel (music director, accompanist), Rori Andersch-Jamieson (music assistant.) Unfortunately not pictured: Jackie Vetter, their wonderful director.
How do you see your work contributing to the larger conversation within your field or community?
Ghost Story was an experiment for us in many ways - we wanted to create an intimate musical experience (sometimes called a “chamber musical”) with fewer characters than we were used to. We also wanted to focus more closely on specificity in our characters’ times, races, and genders. As a field, theater is currently grappling with inclusivity in casting and storytelling; everyone wants to see more diverse performers onstage, and feature work by diverse creative teams, but this is hard to implement in practice and often involves casting performers for whom there are fewer opportunities in “classics” originally written as white or cisgender. This often has the unintended consequence of presenting these identities as the default and removing cultural specificity from these stories. Part of our project for Ghost Story was to dig into the specificities of our characters’ backgrounds, creating roles that not only allowed for Asian performers and trans performers to be featured, but required it. This led to some creative challenges with our casting process for our presentation, but we felt like our show became stronger through setting ourselves these challenges, and we’re grateful for Open AIR’s help in researching and writing a story steeped in specificity that would allow us to work with so many talented people in Montana and beyond!
Mel and Elliot performing Ghost Story.
What are you reading/watching/or listening to?
We both just watched The Lighthouse (2019) and loved it! Elliot is listening to a lot of Melanie and reading Severance by Ling Ma. Mel is listening to the Smiths, Lou Reed, and Chappell Roan. They’re reading Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang and Scarcity by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. One thing we loved about our residency in Montana was the time we got to spend reading in the evenings and the plethora of independent bookstores in Butte; we got to read books we’d always been meaning to get to and try out some new titles in preparation for our next project.
What are you up to now (post Open AIR)?
While we spent our Open AIR residency working on Ghost Story, our time in Butte also inspired our next project. Specifically, touring the Berkeley Pit made us think about the responsibility of stewardship and our ongoing responsibilities to sites where environmental harm has occurred, altering our relationship with the land and its resources. This led to our current project, a survival horror novel about a group of characters lost in a forest bled dry of its natural resources. We’re playing with ergodic literature, seeing how the subjectivity of our characters (and the magic they’re working with) can influence the novel’s form. We’re also both continuing our studies in our MFA programs and working towards our next production of Ghost Story!
Watch Melliot describe their new musical, Ghost Story.
Watch a preview of Melliot’s Ghost Story, or watch the full LIVE concert reading here!
