LINGUA IGNOTA
EARTH, LONDON
The artist extraordinaire seeks out the divine in distress
AS LINGUA IGNOTA, Kristin Hayter has long outgrown the in-the-round floor shows that first brought her face-to-face with oftenhyperventilating audiences. The indoor amphitheatre of Hackney’s Earth, however, is an equally apt setting for what feels like a petition – an appeal for justice, revenge, absolution – to forces both beyond and all around her.
This is the second of two quickly sold-out nights, and from the moment the lights dim and she walks onstage, the reverent hush is mitigated somewhat by audience members taking out their phones to record her, as if they’re misjudging the unique, desolate intimacy of the occasion. And yet as much as a Lingua Ignota show can seem like witnessing a personal trial, there’s an otherworldliness to it too that takes it far beyond voyeurism, beyond even her experiences of domestic abuse that are addressed so extensively, and into psychic realms churning at the edges of consciousness – a confronting of our own darkest fears that becomes a rapt, shared act of acknowledgement.
With no band (aside from a grand piano onstage, all the music is on a backing tape) there’s a necessary element of theatre to the performance, particularly if your idea of theatre is Samuel Beckett’s Not I. Hers is an internal dialogue dramatised to stark yet intensely immersive effect. Whether switching guises from wracked abandon on Do You Doubt Me Traitor as she repeats that shattering line, ‘I don’t eat, I don’t sleep’, to moments of imperious grace, or sitting on the front of the stage and amid the audience, it can feel like the choreography is all that’s holding her together.
Lingua Ignota doesn’t just offer personal testimony. Like Diamanda Galás, she’s become something emblematic. Her vaulting, classically trained live vocals are often accompanied by a pre-recorded chorus of different registers, as though she’s become a host for other oncesilenced voices. And with a set focusing on last year’s stripped-back, folk horror-infused Sinner Get Ready album, themes of devotion (religious and otherwise), divine sufferance and the sense of unnerving destiny lurking at the fringes come to the fore throughout the spindly tremors of Many Hands and the rural rites of Man Is Like A Spring Flower. The covers of traditional elegy Wayfaring Stranger and Dolly Parton’s Jolene are elevated into heartstopping implorations that strip all your bearings from under you, but like all of Lingua Ignota’s music, they light potent beacons among the lands of the lost.
JONATHAN SELZER