A collaboration between Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth Laprelle, the pair’s growing acclaim springs from a shared quartet of talents: Both are historians, storytellers, visual artists, and gifted, intuitive musicians—in combination, a groundbreaking approach.
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Inspired by the richness and tradition of the music, Anna & Elizabeth gather songs and stories from archives and visits with elders. They bring these songs to life in performance with sparse, atmospheric arrangements using guitar, banjo, fiddle, and the uncanny blend of their voices in close harmony. They accompany their songs with stories—of the lyrics, of the singer, of the quest to learn the song—and they illustrate them in mesmerizing fashion. The two revive the old scrolling picture show, dubbed  “crankies”—intricate picture-scrolls illustrating the old songs they sing, which they create in tandem with papercuts, shadow puppets, prints, and embroidered fabric.Anna & Elizabeth met in 2011, and their work has brought them to stages across the world, including the Atlanta Museum of Modern Art; folk festivals in Brooklyn, the Yukon, Chicago, Maine, and Uzbekistan; residencies at universities; summer traditional music schools; and small theaters and folk clubs across the U.S. and U.K.Their second album, which features Grammy nominee and legendary folk singer Alice Gerrard, was released March 2015 on Free Dirt Records. It has been featured on Vice’s Noisey, the Huffington Post, No Depression, and NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concert series.This winter, Anna & Elizabeth are beginning a new cycle of work, inspired by ballad singers of the 1930s and 1940s in Vermont and Virginia—the states where they grew up. Spending time in archives, with the families of these singers, and with a director, Anna & Elizabeth with explore connections between place and tradition to develop a new show, a new set of crankies, and a new album inspired by these ballads.

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Sarah Tourjee, words and voice
Emily Dix Thomas, cello and voice

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Sianna Plavin’s debut album, ‘Go On Now,’ draws from hours of tapes recorded during time carved out from her life as a farmer. The songs were written in the small trailer where she lived in the woods, borrowed rooms in her previous home city of Baltimore City (with free rent under the stipulation that she write music), and later, her home in Providence, Rhode Island. Plavin started drawing attention in 2008 as the front woman of folk duo Backyard Betties and as a member of chamber-folk ensemble Soft Cat. She sang and died four times as four different characters in the first production of the Baltimore Rock Opera Society (BROS), and sang with a 17-piece ensemble supporting an elaborate, DIY, large-scale puppet rendition of Harry Nilsson’s The Point with the Annex Theater in 2009. In 2010 Plavin moved to Massachusetts to farm, and began piecing together her solo sound that is at once warm, intimate and haunting. While her solo performance is stark, Plavin collaborates with artists and puppeteers to create often site-specific, elaborate variety shows. Her collaboration with “crankie” maker Fay Strongin was featured at the Rhode Island Museum of Art in July 2013. She has played shows with artists ranging from Tune-Yards to Christopher Paul Stelling and improbably once opened for Matt and Kim and The Death Set. ‘Go On Now’ was released Summer 2015.

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