A sonic portrait of unity in Norwalk
Lemieux set out to show city’s diversity
NORWALK — Armed with recorder and microphone, Sarah Lemieux set out in March to paint a sonic portrait representative of the city’s diversity.
Starting from Calf Pasture Beach, Lemieux would approach strangers with a short script she’d written and ask them to read it into the recorder. It went, “Hello, my name is this, I live in this part of Norwalk, I like this about Norwalk, this is how I define myself, and then ‘We are connected.’ ”
“I started man-on-the-streeting and it was not super functional,” Lemieux said, seated in Silvermine Market on a Tuesday in May, just before going on a sound collecting mission in the neighborhood. “Some people were down. Some people were like, ‘No, no, I don’t talk to strangers.’ ”
So Lemieux rethought her approach and, using her contacts as a Board of Education member, began calling people she knew, explaining
her idea for the project — which is part of her masters thesis in composition at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and will be exhibited at the Rene Soto Gallery throughout July — and setting up recording sessions.
The idea is to promote unity by collecting a multitude of different speakers, in different languages, to say a greeting and “We are connected.” The other words spoken into the recorder, Lemieux edits, distorts, and plays over video she shot of Norwalk neighborhoods and landmarks, which she then animated in a style reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s 2001 film “Waking Life.” The result will be projected onto a screen at the gallery.
“What I fundamentally want to do is provoke an emotional response in people through their connection to where we live and through their connection to everybody else who lives where they live,” Lemieux said. “We all inhabit these spaces and have these experiences that are common.”
Lemieux is a musician by training. The daughter of a classical guitarist and a blues piano player, Lemieux started playing piano at age 3, and added other instruments into her repertoire — including guitar, violin and bass — in her early teenage years. During the late-1990s and early-2000s, she was a selfdescribed “indie-rock geek” living in the East Village. After college, she performed jazz, blues and Americana and began teaching, which led to an interest in composition.
“Being involved in municipal politics and also being an alive human in 2019 is frightening because it seems like people are relating to each other much less well, partially because social media makes it easier to just scream at somebody and walk away and you don’t have to see them,” Lemieux said. “But it seems rather important to me at this moment to try and get people to work together to see what’s good about these little civilizations that we have.”
The project began solely as an audio composition, but quickly decided that the video aspect of the piece made a more coherent statement about unity and place.
To capture a diverse range of voices, Lemieux contacted the Uceda Institute, a language school in South Norwalk, the Al Madany Islamic Center and Congregation Beth El. She’s gotten contributions in English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, French, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese and Greek.
By exploring Norwalk’s diverse cultures and neighborhoods, Lemieux hopes to bring into relief the many things shared by the city’s residents.
“There are a lot of things that you can hear everywhere in Norwalk — visual commonalities and sonic commonalities,” Lemieux said. “Everywhere you go you can hear some kind of water, everywhere you go there are a lot of the same birds, and everywhere you go you some permutation of that train.”