
A dialogue and a song, visualized
Recently I enjoyed reading Yerma, a short play by Federico García Lorca part of his trilogy of rural tragedies.
The first scene of the second act is half a dialogue and half a song between a group of laundresses. In the first part, two of them (3 & 4) lead the conversation gossiping about Yerma, with others intervening to criticize (6) or defend her (5). In the second part, they start singing a popular tune about husbands, lovemaking and motherhood.
I was curious about the rythmic pattern intended by the author and how it would feel in a play with the different alternating voices, so I parsed the text and did a quick plot to visualize it.
In it, the initial ping-pong pattern evidences the dialogue and when the song starts, there is a series of scales as the different singers alternate.