Anna Roberts-Gevalt is a Baltimore-based fiddle player and educator. After falling in love with old-time appalachian music in college, Anna travelled to Eastern Kentucky to study. She has worked extensively with ballad singer Elizabeth LaPrelle on multi-faceted performances that include storytelling, ornate harmonies and lo-fi visual pieces utilizing puppetry and traditional craft. “I believe so strongly in the importance of this old music and all that surrounds it,” says Anna. “I believe, too, in the power of the stage — the attempt to synthesize the world into a series of moments and images that move us into feeling, into action, into realization… My work investigates bridges between these worlds.”
Anna Roberts-Gevalt was a recipient of a OneBeat Accelerator for her project Sick Studio. Sick Studio is a collaborative project between Anna, a chronically ill musician, and Sarah Galdes, an able-bodied producer. The project asks, what if recording studios had been invented by sick people?
The two artists are building together a recording process that embraces and centers a sick state of being and perspective : a shared set of accessibility tools, accommodations, disability-centered working language, and processes that bridge the gaps of Anna’s specific impairments. The fruits of their experimentation will be a short EP, a how-to-zine [online & physical]— a guidebook for chronically ill recording, and writing documenting their process.
