Pastoral Drama stages the narratives of Eurydice (a figure from Greek myth) and Eumelio (a gender-swapped version of Eurydice featured in Agostino Agazzari’s operatic interlude Eumelio, composed in 1606) on two parallel screens. These narratives were filmed chronologically over the course of nine months in my studio, using small drawings, speckled clay, weeping ink, encrusted plasticine, and agglomerations of glitter and lichen. The videos are broadly synchronised, as are the stories they draw from, and the character designs for Eurydice and Eumelio are based on how I looked at 21 years old, with feminine and masculine aspects exaggerated respectively. Their deviations are significant: Eumelio gets a happy ending, returning to the company of men with his mentor Apollo, while Eurydice is doomed to Hades. Her screen goes blank at this moment, and never returns, while on Eumelio’s screen an improvised coda unfurls, in which his happy ending curdles into nonsense and disaster.
