It’s that time of year when we reflect on the intersection of Truth and Reconciliation with opera. So yesterday I attended a lecture/recital by young Métis singer and scholar Camryn Dewar in the RBA at lunchtime. The title was The Evolution of Indigenous Female Representation 1879-Present and the domaine was Canadian opera; so no room for La fanciulla del West or Doctor Atomic. In fact, truth to tell, there Wasn’t much Indigenous female presence in Canadian opera until quite recently. There’s the really awful colonialist Canada’s Welcome by Dixon and Clappé which was dealt with. Somers’ Louis Riel which got a brief mention but doesn’t have much in the way of female characters. Victor Davies’ The Ecstasy of Rita Joe which didn’t get (or deserve) a mention. Perhaps Jani Lauzon’s I Call myself Princess might have deserved a mention even if it’s about opera rather than being an opera.
The Canadian Art Song Project (CASP) has announced that Laurence Jobidon (right) and Jesse Plessis (left) are the inaugural mentees in the Chung-Wai Chow and John Wright Art Song Mentorship Programme for Composers; a new CASP initiative designed to support emerging composers working in the field of Canadian Art Song. They will be working with mentors Luna Pearl Woolf and Jocelyn Morlock, respectively.
Over the course of the next year, Laurence Jobidon will be working with Luna Pearl Woolf on her project that sets the poetry of Blanche Lamontagne; the first French-Canadian woman poet to publish under her own name, while Jesse Plessis will be working with Jocelyn Morlock on a project entitled Time’s Kiss that will interweave texts by Rabindranath Tagore, Anne Carson, and Geneviève Plessis.
