Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree has been around for 20 years and has been performed about 400 times and it still feels very experimental and rather weird in a good way. It mucks about with time and space and identity while layering on multiple meta-theatrical elements that create an experience that is simultaneously engrossing and somewhat disorienting.
Immersed is an audio-visual performance piece created by Justin Gray. There are visuals but the raison d’etre of the piece is recorded music. The whole thing was written to be recorded and then played back using Dolby ATMOS to create a three dimensional moving soundscape. I got to experience it on Saturday night in the TD Music hall at Massey Hall which has a thirty eight speaker array for doing just this kind of thing. It was playing as part of Luminato.
There were thirty eight musicians involved in the project…
There was a time when site specific productions were very much part of the Toronto opera scene but, like much else, they seemed to disappear with the pandemic. So it was especially pleasing to see Tapestry Opera, Luminato and Metropolitan United Church combining for just such an event.
Nigamon/Tunai is part ritual, part performance, part narrative. It’s based around the fight of an Indigenous group in the Colombian Amazon to prevent a road being built through their land in order to exploit a copper deposit but it interweaves this with water lore and creation myths from all over the Americas. It’s playing in the Ada Slaight Hall at the Daniels Spectrum as part of Luminato.
“…it’s weirder and less funny and less charming than the plays I like to write, and also I’ve taken out a lot of the conventions, conventions that I like, the ones that make us want to watch plays.” So writes Hannah Moscovitch about her 2024 play Red Like Fruit which opened at Soulpepper on Thursday night as part of Luminato in a production directed by Christian Barry.
Things slow down just a little bit in June but with both Luminato and Opera 5’s Opera festival it’s not that quiet. Here’s what’s coming down:
Dragon’s Tale; music by Chan Ka Nin, text by Mark Brownell, premiered at Harbourfront last night. It’s a rather clever mash up of two stories which, taken together, address how we face the future without abandoning the past or, alternatively, getting stuck in it. The first story concerns a young Chinese Canadian woman in Toronto, Xiao Lian, whose widowed father is dying. She is torn between her desire to “get a life” and his obsessive insistence that the “old ways”, meaning essentially here looking after him, come first.
June is fast approaching and, as ever, it’s one of the odder months in the performance calendar. Here’s what has caught my eye (so far).
Hell’s Fury(*) is a two man show about Hanns Eisler conceived and created by Tim Albery. It’s focussed on his time in the United States and, somewhat, on his return to the DDR. It combines songs from the Hollywood Songbook (poems by Brecht and others set by Eisler), dialogue and projections to tell the story of Eisler’s arrival in Hollywood, his work in the US, his deportation as a result of the “work” of the House Un-American Activities Committee and his return to the GDR and struggles to come to terms with the Stalinist culturecrats leading ultimately to drink, depression and death.
June is shaping up to busier than one might expect. But first here’s one last announcement for May. On the 22nd B-Exalted have a choral concert at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene at 8pm. Soloists are Dallas Chorley, soprano; Rebecca Gray, alto; Charles Davidson and David Walsh, tenors, and Janaka Welihinda, bass. More details here.
And so to June itself. There are two items of interest on June 1st. At Hart House Theatre at 2pm there’s a performance of Charlotte: A Tri-Coloured Play with Music before it leaves for a tour of Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Israel. I’m curious to see how it’s developed since we saw a version that was still rather WIP in June 2017. Later, at 8pm at St. Thomas Anglican Church there’s the latest in the Confluence Series. This one is titled At the River and features, among others, Larry Beckwith, Dylan Bell, Ian Cusson, James Meade, Marion Newman, Patricia O’Callaghan, Suba Sankaran, Jacqueline Teh and Giles Tomkins. This has become a “don’t miss” series.
operaramblings 