Connected Identities

This program, developed together with Mexican composer and singer Diana Syrse around her music and its context, explores the many dimensions of the necessarily troubled notion of identity: identity as a cultural mosaic that is always mixed, but also identity as a process of individuation, in contact with otherness and collective experiences, in the complexity of a cultural and natural landscape in constant motion.

Diana Syrse’s identity is mixed from the outset: born in 1984 in Mexico City, she carries the dual heritage of Hispanic culture and of the Mayan culture she inherited from her family, hailing from the province of Yucatán. This initial cross-​fertilization, which is characteristic of the entire Latin American area, becomes a paradigm of multiculturalism when it is experienced on the scale of a globalized world, the one that Diana Syrse encountered in the life path that led her to live in the United States, then in Germany and France.

Diana Syrse’s music reflects this cross-​fertilization in her compositional style, which expands that of European classical music by incorporating the timbres, rhythms and instruments of the two cultural founts that irrigate the Mexican soil. In the diptych of monodramas Connected Identities, presented here for the first time in its entirety, Diana Syrse literally embodies the many voices she carries, haunting spirits that will sing in turn, within a wider constellation of authors and composers who have sought to formulate the nature of Latin American métissage. Our guides are Silvestre Revueltas and Darius Milhaud, two musicians each turned towards the other’s continent, who have sought to give life to the dream of a world music where eclecticism does not contradict higher musical standards, but on the contrary is the key to them.

This program was premiered at the Théâtre Claude Lévi-​Strauss, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, on April 18, 2021, and presented as a live stream.

Production by La Chambre aux échos and Secession Orchestra. Secession Orchestra benefited from a residency at the Fondation Singer Polignac and the support of the DRAC Ile-​de-​France/​Ministère de la culture for structuring, and of the Caisse des dépôts.