BRETT UMLAUF

Abbess-composer Kassia of Byzantium (9th-c.) is one of the incandescent women religious creative artists featured on Hazelnut Road, my multi-sited ethnographic performance project. I try to access historical women’s great works by learning from those that preserve and interpret their legacies to-day through manuscripts and oral tradition. I pilgrimaged to Kassia’s historical homeland of Constantinople, now modern-day Istanbul, to walk in her footsteps. I lived with Orthodox nuns in Greece to imagine the rhythms of her monastic life. Alongside practitioners of Byzantine chant, I learned to read the ancient notation and listen to the living tradition that together carry her music and texts to us.