Bassanda Podcast Ep 4
BP 006 GTR Ch 06-07 [
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Welcome to the Bassanda Podcast! I’m Chris Smith.
This is a space for riffing upon history and upon speculative fiction, for world-building, for comedy and dialog and badinage, for bad jokes, historical ironies, and the imagination of a kinder, gentler, richer and more creative universe. Bassanda the mythical nation originates in the fertile musical and ancillary imaginations of my friends Roger Landes and Chipper Thompson (find their links in the show notes). When, as a friend of the General and the Reverend, I was first playing with the idea of a fictional alternate-universe identity for my own TTU Celtic Ensemble, I realized that perhaps I didn’t have to invent a world, if the lads were willing to let me borrow Bassanda. They were, and here we are.
The first speculative fiction novel set in this universe, which is serialized at smithscribe.substack.com, is THE GREAT TRAIN RIDE FOR BASSANDA.
For GREAT TRAIN RIDE, the principal 1906 POV character is the ethnographer Cecile Lapin and the 1980s POV character is the scholar and Vietnam combat vet S. Jefferson Winesap. At intervals, many other voices are heard, especially in the dossier materials derived from the vast trove of the Bassanda correspondence, but Cecile’s and Jefferson’s are the eyes through which we see. Other key characters on the team who unite to deliver ancient electromagnetic Documents to Bassanda are the scholar and widower James Lincoln Habjar-Lawrence; the assassin and bodyguard Ismail Durang; the explorer and writer Algeria Main-Smith; and the Brethren, two long-lived, North American-born Friends of Bassanda: the Colonel Torres and the General Landes.
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Chapter 6, “Council of War,” is a bit of an info dump, when the senior members of the team, the Colonel, the General, and Algeria, brief the newer members, Cecile and Professor Habjar-Lawrence, on what Bassanda is, what its people seek, and which imperial nations threaten its existence. That’s why, later in the chapter, Ismail reappears, bearing exceptionally disturbing news of two killings, in order to establish the stakes, and to explain the motivations that send good people like Cecile to war despite their ambivalence about its brutality. The chapter also has to explain why the Brethren cannot themselves carry the Documents–because they are too well known. The thought is that Cecile, relatively unknown but with languages and ethnographic knowledge of central Asia, might thus be an unobtrusive courier. There’s thus a bit of Frodo’s journey in her trek, with Ismail and the Professor, from Paris to Bassanda.
Chapter 7, from the Correspondence, is an excerpt from the Bassandan Dictionary of National Biography, which explains more of Cecile’s own family lineage and back story, and helps to contextualize this young woman’s own experience in the larger and longer arcs of colonial history. In a craft note, it also makes clear that Cecile is going to survive the adventure portrayed in GREAT TRAIN RIDE–that she herself will outlive its events. The challenge is–who among her companions will not do likewise?
Both chapters speak to my interest in and convictions regarding history, culture, and politics in the long 20th century, and my commitment to finding the resistance stories, both real and wistfully only imagined, that either help us take solace from the past, or imagine a better, more liberating future–or present.
Because the Bassanda universe is a kind of immersive theater, but one built with words rather than props, in an arena of shared imagination rather than that of a building. Moreover, in contrast to marvelous theater companies like Double Edge or Punchdrunk—whose actors and directors seek to provide invited audience members the opportunity to become experiencers within the piece—the BMV’s primary actors are simultaneously its primary audience.
A better analogy, then, is to Punchdrunk Enrichment’s immersive installations (for example, the shows called Against Captain’s Orders, Under the Eiderdown or, especially, The Lost Lending Library), which enlist an audience of learners as actors within their own epic-mythic imaginative universe. My particular target audience as an educator is secondary- and tertiary-level students, most especially students for whom artistic creativity and professional skills-development are central motivators (whether or not they are actually studying visual or performing arts in school). Regardless, my goal is to empower these young artists to experience their lives as simultaneously pragmatic and also mythic: to equip them to engage with the tactile details of artistic experience and construction but at the same time to simultaneously perceive that engagement as part of larger practical and metaphorical arcs of motivation, aspiration, community, and the spirit.
This overlapping simultaneity of actor <=> audience is what thus makes the Bassanda universe education. Because the skill-set of a functional artist includes, in part, the capacity to see larger patterns, to see those patterns’ resonance and universality in human experience, and then very importantly to concretize artistic expressions which make these patterns visible to and experiential for wider audiences. So BMV students, or the members of my own Elegant Savages Orchestra, which is the cosplay version of the Texas Tech University Celtic Ensemble, are not “acting” or “pretending”—they are inhabiting personae which reflect who they aspire to be. Internal consistency—between fictional characters, institutions, and events, for example—within the Bassanda universe matters, but so does, simultaneously, external consistency with the outer world of history, culture, and global experience.
We’re endeavoring to provide environments—physical, cognitive, communal, participatory, temporal—which permit young artists to experience their lives and work as, in fact, both epic and mythic, and thus potentially profoundly impactful, and then to empower these young artists “build out” and fully inhabit their individualized personal and artistic myths, and in turn employ them in service of their communities and the wider world.
The Bassanda universe is not “escapism”. In a sense, it’s rather “engage-ism”: a profoundly committed and inhabited application of the individual and communal artist’s personal myth to the challenges of samsara and the complex phenomenal world. Christopher Small, the great music educator, argued that musicians, in the act of performance, bring into existence for the duration of that performance the ideal society in which they wish to live. And that is what we do in the BMV, as well.
CLOSER:
This is the Bassanda Podcast, a place for riffing upon history, for world-building, for comedy and dialog and badinage, for bad jokes, historical ironies, and the imagination of a kinder, gentler, richer and more creative universe. Each week, we recall chapters in the Correspondence, and we talk with guests, from the Multiverse and beyond, about world-building and imagination. You can find us on your podcast app, and also on Twitter / Threads / Bluesky: search #BassandaPodcast, send to BassandaPodcast@gmail.com, or find me @ChrisSmithMuso. I’d love to hear from you, and I’ll talk to you again soon.
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NOTES for THE BASSANDA PODCAST BP 004
Chris Smith SFF serial fiction: www.smithscribe.substack.com
Roger Landes: www.rogerlandes.com
Chipper Thompson: www.chipperthompson.com
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