elegiac

Lourdes Portillo’s elegiac “Senorita Extraviada” documents with low-key persistence the conditions in Ciudad Juarez that make some say, “There is no better place in the world to kill a young woman.”

It’s an elegiac relationship, compounded by the recent passing of my grandmother, who embodied holiness and unadulterated love in every sense.

While his early novels paid fealty to the expansive, twisty prose of Faulkner and the unsettling Southern gothic of O’Connor, his poetry and later novels moved toward the elegiac sentiments and literary precision of Welty.

But that was not the only reason that there was an elegiac theme to Monday night.

Filling the back wall of the stage is a screen for the film artist Bill Morrison’s trademark, haunting manipulations of scratchy, blurry archival footage, its ghostliness echoed by the choir’s floating, elegiac sound.