Pet-owners often make profound decisions about their dog or cat, given that the law treats animals as property, ours to dispose of as we wish.
I shudder when I think about it, ashamed of the time 32 years ago when I was a coward, bowing to my landlord’s wishes to have our cat de-clawed, a brutal procedure that amputates their main weapon for self-defence.
Crystal lived a long life, clawless.
Yes I felt bad afterwards. But I wonder if I had any idea of how the cat felt?
News-flash #1: animals can’t talk, can’t tell us how they feel, except their screams of pain.
News-flash #2: humans have a great deal of power over animals.
Excuse me if I state the obvious. But we don’t always think about it, don’t always notice as we subdue the Earth.
I’m thinking about this a great deal lately, living with a beloved dog nearing the end of her life. It’s a version of palliative care. We haven’t treated Sam’s cancer. She has a huge lump that keeps growing. We were offered the option to remove it, but Sam would have been learning how to function on three legs as a senior citizen: so we chose to leave her more or less intact while aiming to manage her symptoms.
Sam and her lump
When she seems to be in pain we give her a pain reliever, while watching for evidence that the cure is worse than the disease: such as tummy troubles brought on by the pain meds.
I’m hyper-sensitive to such questions, having argued with a doctor about my own illnesses & meds. I have the sound of a doctor engraved in my memory saying “who’s the doctor here”. But never mind, I’m lucky at how things have played out over the decades. My point is, we keep the essence of the Hippocratic Oath in mind.
“Above all do no harm.”
While Sam is the smartest dog I’ve ever seen, able to understand a great deal of what we’re saying, we still can’t pretend that we always know what she’s feeling. I wonder whether dogs conceal their pain or somehow let us know. There are behaviours dogs will exhibit that may be signs of suffering, such as hiding, sleeping more, being less interested in play, less able to run.
Sam
In fact there’s a whole category of study for people wondering about their aging pet and whether it’s time to say goodbye. The HHHHHMM Quality of Life (QoL) Scale was invented by Alice Villalobos, employing seven categories (five beginning with an H, two with an M) of happiness and comfort, to assess your animal’s quality of life, namely Hurt (evidence of pain), Hunger (does the creature have an appetite), Hydration, Hygiene, Happiness, Mobility and “More good days than bad”.
I’ve seen it done as a calculation, where each of the seven is rated out of ten, with a total that is somewhere between zero and 70. I’m not sure about trying to reduce a life to a number, but it’s a good wakeup call to the owner to recognize whether the animal is suffering silently.
I hope its clear why I put the headline “playing God” on this discussion. We use a QoL scale to look at the lives of the dogs or cats we own, whose lives are entirely under our control.
That word “life” is one we throw around a great deal, considering how rarely we seem to consider its meaning, let alone to consider the quality of our own lives. Perhaps I should speak for myself, but I’m going by what I see from friends and colleagues via social media.
If the pandemic has been good for one thing, it’s in the mirror it holds up to each of us, provoking questions we didn’t ask the same way before 2020. Last year I was working as a manager at the University of Toronto, while also juggling other responsibilities. Two or three times per week I’d zip to my mom’s to give her lunch. I found myself rethinking everything, as so many others are right now. I retired from my university job not just because I was over 65 but also because the risks I was taking at work were not just to my own health but to the health of my mom as well.
There’s currently an employee shortage in some workplaces. Employers are finding it harder to fill certain jobs. You’ll hear people speak of being underpaid, and perhaps that’s true. I believe that what we’re seeing in workplaces begins with the kind of questions a pandemic raises. No I’m not saying they’ve looked at a Quality of Life scale: although maybe we should all be thinking about such things. When you’re hearing about the virus and vaccines and statistics about death on a daily basis, it’s inevitable to also ask: is the job worth it? Does my job allow me to do enough of the things that make life meaningful? Or is it more a matter of safety and risk in the workplace that is at work right now? And there’s also the whole problem of childcare, so problematic when schools were closed or locked down.
I hope life is resuming. I miss concerts and operas, seeing friends across the table at restaurants. Perhaps, missing such beautiful and lovely things, we shall appreciate them rather than taking them for granted.
I’ve been listening to the CD “Journey Through Night” by Odin Quartet.
Here’s how they describe themselves on one of the sites I found extolling their virtues:
Passionate about chamber music, the Toronto-based Odin Quartet represents the diversity and the promise of youth in Canada. Named after the one-eyed Norse god, seeker of knowledge and holder of the wisdom of the world, the Odin Quartet explores the role of classical music in modern-day storytelling. Since 2015, the ensemble is also dedicated to making classical music accessible to new generations of listeners, by promoting modern Canadian compositions, including those of cellist Samuel Bisson, alongside classical music literature.
Throughout the recording I found myself thinking about the ways music can signify, sometimes functioning as pure music while often aiming to do more. That phrase “modern-day storytelling” seems apt, especially in the ambitious creations I encountered today from seven Canadian composers.
Both of Ronald Royer’s contributions are studies in contrast. His Danzon Overture is in two parts like a French Overture (think for instance of the way Handel begins Messiah), although Royer’s second part is infused with Cuban dance rhythms. His String Quartet No 1 has two contrasting movements, where the first is contemplative and the second action oriented.
Bruno Degazio’s Suite from The Pearl is in two parts, based on the great Hymn of the Pearl, from the Gnostic scripture the Acts of Thomas the Apostle. The complexities of the story are outlined in the comprehensive program notes. Although I’m not yet able to say I really get what Degazio is undertaking, if nothing else it’s totally fascinating music. And I admire its ambition.
Samuel Bisson, the cellist in the quartet and their resident composer, is represented in For Mor, a piece that was his wedding processional and recessional. Its ceremonial function doesn’t get in the way of it as music.
That sure doesn’t sound like a wedding march.
Alex Eddington’s gibbons vs GIBBONS is such a cool idea for a piece, that I listened, bracing myself for the possibility that the concept is too brilliant for the piece. I’ve seen this before with music and visual art as well, tremendous ideas on paper that simply don’t fly in the execution. But Eddington’s idea is truly brilliant. Imagine a few apes of the species “gibbon”. Now imagine their encounter with the music of the composer “GIBBONS”. And of course, knowing that we’re talking about apes and music, it devolves into a kind of debate or battle. The quartet enacts an encounter between two simian gibbons with (the composer) Gibbons’ music, and the wacky collision we might imagine. It’s an electrifying 3 minutes and 24 seconds.
Daniel Mehdizadeh’s Dialectics is true to its name, a kind of musical exploration of discourse itself. While the program notes are among the briefest, that might be due to the purity of this composition that does exactly as its title would suggest, employing dissonance near the beginning and (spoiler alert) moving to a resolution.
I have listened to Victims of Eagles by Elizabeth Raum a couple of times, fascinated by its emotional contours, needing to listen to it some more. Commissioned by the Odin Quartet for Beethoven’s 250th birthday, the piece is based on Raum’s earlier song setting words of poet John Hicks. In its quartet incarnation she incorporates the “dot-dot-dot-dash” we know from Beethoven’s Fifth, the Morse code for the letter V of “Victory” as well as “victim”.
Chris Meyer’s three movement “Journey Through Night”, that gives its name to the CD, would aim for a kind of programmatic depiction of the moods associated with the transition from dusk to midnight to dawn. I’m reminded of Richard Strauss, the most extreme practitioner of pictorial realism that I can think of, as for instance in the overpowering sunrise we hear early in his Alpine Symphony. Can a composer of romantic music nowadays dare to be representational? Impressions and emotions are another matter I suppose. Meyer has us mostly inside the feeling, but the outside is still there as well, a welcome visit to terrain serious composers rarely seem to visit nowadays.
Does that sound like a lot of stories? I’m barely scraping the surface in what I said here. This CD at a little over an hour long, is a genuine Journey. I shall listen some more. If I weren’t already committed elsewhere, I would be attending their CD release concert Saturday November 6th at Metropolitan Community Church, 115 Simpson Avenue, an event which alas I can’t attend. Click the link if you want to know more, especially if you’re interested in tickets to the concert. I’m sure it will be a lot of fun.
The headline is the inevitable result of a weekend watching and comparing two different virtual offerings from two opera companies, one much bolder than the other. Yesterday’s Opera Atelier headline aims to praise what’s praiseworthy, so I used the word “bold”, leaving my misgivings for the latter part of the review.
And I loved the new Canadian Opera Company Gianni Schicchi, their first opera presented using the new technological upgrades at the Four Seasons Centre, available via free download for six months.
Amy Lane is the director of this charming take on Puccini’s popular work, chosen by the COC for their first virtual opera.
Director Amy Lane
At times Lane turns the cast loose to play for laughs. Both Roland Wood in the title role and Doug MacNaughton as Maestro Spinelloccio amuse us with their vocal choices and physical prowess. Yet they’re mostly deadpan. The comedy is underplayed except when it’s time for the group to explode in fury. I find my taste in comedy has changed over the years, as I’m not amused by operas that are too broad, too blatant in their expectation of laughs. The camera sometimes comes in tight upon a committed series of performances without any trace of overacting. It works. And there’s even a bit of a surprise at the end.
Puccini’s indestructible romance can’t fail so long as it’s entrusted to sympathetic singers. Lauretta (Hera Hyesang Park) and Rinuccio (Andrew Haji) win our hearts by being authentic and real. How do you approach something so well known? Park’s execution of the famous aria is subtly understated, a gentle delivery that works especially well with the intimacy of the virtual medium. Haji, who has been busy this year (at least in what I’ve been watching, between the Barber of Seville in Quebec and Against the Grain’s Savitri), also acquits himself well in an aria that’s not nearly as famous nor used in many films (we hear it briefly in Serpico).
Today (again making a comparison in my head between opera presentations on consecutive nights) I recalled words from the third book of Edmund Spenser’s epic The Faerie Queen, a sign over a door saying something like “be bold, be bold, but not too bold”. Spenser’s knights could just as easily be artistic directors striking a balance between creativity (“be bold”) to entice and intrigue the audience, and fiscal prudence (“be not too bold”) to avoid bankruptcy.
On November 1st as I write this, my deadline to renew my COC subscription is just over a week away on November 10th. Many of us have credits in our accounts due to operas cancelled last season. No Parsifal, no Figaro, no Aida, no Dutchman, (if I am recalling correctly), and yet these were paid for by subscribers. So now when the COC offer us three operas to begin 2022 (Butterfly, Flute and Traviata), they owe some of us money for the shows that they had to cancel. Let that be preamble to the question of what the COC offer us, in their virtual offerings in the autumn of 2021, the three operas to re-open in 2022, and thereafter. I wonder how they can manage to stay afloat, how to pay all those people.
But for now (with Gianni Schicchi) and in February (Butterfly) the COC count on the assistance of Mr Popularity, aka Giacomo Puccini.
For now? The fact that the COC are still in business is bold enough for me.
Opera Atelier’s new film of Angel –fully-staged and filmed at St. Lawrence Hall—will be streaming until Friday, November 12.
Angel is a bold experiment. I’m not sure how to describe the work, an interesting mixture of styles and idioms that crosses boundaries between disciplines and centuries.
It seems operatic at first glance. Angel enlists Tafelmusik baroque orchestra in the simulation of something old and authentic even as they play music revised and/or repurposed in a new context. While we encounter familiar texts from Milton and Vivaldi, they’re reframed, alongside new compositions from Edward Huizinga and Christopher Bagan: or at least that’s what I’m surmising from the press release.
The most exciting musical moments for me were “Summer 1” and “Winter 1”, Max Richter’s re-composition (their word), or perhaps more properly, adaptation, of music we know from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. They say “Angel marks the first time Richter’s recomposition will be played on period instruments.” I think of it as adaptation, because we recognize the original in a new guise, as though this were a cover version of a well-known song.
I’ve been surrendering to the piece while suspending judgment, as per the suggestion from Opera Atelier’s Co-Artistic Director Marshall Pynkoski, who said “It is our hope that the music, text, dancing and staging of Angel will wash over you like a dream”. I am enjoying the disorientation, especially Richter’s modern rhythms played on the baroque instruments of Tafelmusik. The reworking of Vivaldi’s brilliant violin writing in the hands of Elisa Citterio? fabulous as usual.
While it’s not hanging together for me (speaking as someone who stopped watching in the middle), and couldn’t hold my attention for more than a few minutes at a time, it’s lovely to watch. On a big screen it’s quite lovely to look at. There’s much beauty in this film, many talented artists including the Nathaniel Dett Chorale, soprano Measha Brueggergosman, tenor Colin Ainsworth, soprano Mireille Asselin, baritone Jesse Blumberg, soprano Meghan Lindsay, baritone John Tibbetts, and bass-baritone Douglas Williams working together on something that resembles a big song cycle filmed (rather than staged) by a ballet company.
Soprano Measha Brueggergosman
Not for the first time, I find myself thinking “Opera Atelier” is a ballet company not an opera company. There is static beauty, lovely moments, but more lyricism than drama, opportunities through camera close-up for their usual delight in youthful physiques, without much of anything spiritual to go with a title like “Angel”, unless of course we’re using modern connotations of the word as found in New Age philosophy or in films such as Wings of Desire. Indeed, there’s more of Milton’s Satan (mistaken by some romantics as the hero of Paradise Lost, who becomes a fish out of water without more grounding in an actual story) than any other angel so far (I’m about 2/3 of the way through Angel as I write this).
No Angel is not a complex story, indeed I can’t quite discern what the ‘story’ is: which is surely why Marshall suggested we let it wash over us like a dream. You’ll encounter Rilke’s poetry, different music in different styles, fascinating dances. But it also lacks some of the rewards of the baroque, in short segments that aren’t required to work as individual set-pieces, zipping ahead to the next brief sequence. Less is more, and I think Angel would work better if it had less text that was explored more fully, fewer talents, properly exploited, rather than this cavalcade of brilliant moments. I miss Marshall’s keen dramatic instincts deconstructing an opera, indeed if I didn’t know better, I’d say that this time co-artistic director Jeannette Lajeunesse Zingg seems to be in charge of a work that is so intensely balletic—even when opera singers are asked to dance in front of the camera—as to turn the singing and music into a mere soundtrack for dance.
In some ways it’s like an album or anthology especially when we view it not in a theatre but on our electronic devices: where I can choose to skip ahead to the parts I like. Such are the risks of being bold in creating something “new” while employing so many of the vestiges of something “old”.
YMMV, as they say.
Single tickets for the streamed presentation are $30 and on sale now. Tickets and information at OperaAtelier.com.
Exile doesn’t just occur when you’re distant from your homeland. What about artists ignored or silenced inside their country? I never thought of it that way before reading Simon Wynberg’s excellent essay in the liner notes to ARC Ensemble’s new recording Chamber Works by Dmitri Klebanov. It’s much more than musicology, illuminating a terrific recording, the latest of their “Music in Exile” series.
The politics surrounding a work of art changes our reception of that art, especially when the life and career of the artist is impacted by non-artistic concerns.
Who is Dmitri Klebanov? Having listened over and over to this new CD, I am surprised at how good the music is from this unknown figure whom I’ve only discovered for the first time in 2021. You can take a step in learning about Klebanov and his music with this CD, a splendid introduction to a composer who deserves to be better known and more fully explored. The CD can be obtained through this website.
I’ll quote a paragraph from the RCM website that answers my question about the composer:
A casualty of Soviet-era cultural suppression and anti-Semitism, Jewish-Ukrainian composer Dmitri Klebanov (1907-1986) is among the scores of musicians whose works are largely forgotten and rarely performed. Fortunate not to have been among those artists and intellectuals arrested, killed, or sent to forced labour camps during Stalin’s brutal reign, Klebanov understood that his career and survival depended on producing works that glorified Soviet accomplishments. But he also managed to produce compositions that reveal a boundless imagination, a spirited vivacity, and melodic confidence, all of which justify his inclusion in the classical canon.
Dmiti Klebanov (1907-1987)
The CD and its performances are a step in that direction, of getting Klebanov’s music included in the classical canon. This excerpt from the CD is on YouTube.
You’ll recognize a melody from a Christmas carol in the opening to the first movement of the 4th String Quartet, a motiv developed further in that movement and then taken further in the third movement.
The quartet #4 (dating from 1946) is the earliest of the three big works on the CD, that also features trio #2 (1958) and quartet #5 (1965).
Listening to these marvelous pieces, I can’t help but muse about the cruel machinations controlling our access to great works of art. I’ve been listening to an old recording of his third symphony.
Klebanov composed nine symphonies, among works that have been suppressed, possibly lost. I am eager to find out more about this composer, to hear more of his music. I saw mention in Wynberg’s essay of piano pieces that I wish I could obtain to play: but when I looked in the U of T Faculty of Music online catalogue could only see one piece mentioned, the Japanese Silhouettes (also on youtube).
Popularity is a funny thing. Would we judge Khatchaturian solely on the basis of his Sabre Dance but forgetting his ballets Gayaneh or Spartacus, or Rimsky-Korsakov from the Flight of the Bumblebee while ignoring his operas, or Scheherazade? And when you insert politics into the discussion the picture is distorted much further, when we recall that a composer such as Klebanov was dissuaded or discouraged from purely artistic creation and required to promote Soviet ideals in his art. We need to remember that when listening to something like this melody for strings, one of the pieces that survived Soviet era censorship:
There are many wonderful moments on the ARC Ensemble CD. I find myself listening over & over to it, finding new depths every time through, in performances of wonderful commitment.
ARC Ensemble: Erika Raum and Marie Bérard (violins), Kevin Ahfat (piano), Steven Dann (viola), and Thomas Wiebe (cello). (photo: Suane Hupa)
Klebanov reminds me of several composers, partly because he’s influenced, partly because he’s an original. Don’t be put off by the dates of these works, a period (1940s – 1960s) when the most dissonant of the modernists were at their height in Europe. Klebanov is more like Gustav Mahler or Dmitri Shostakovich. Like Mahler there are occasional suggestions of something spiritual or even religious in his music, yet he regularly dances back and forth between major and minor, playing with your expectations. Like Shostakovich the instruments are employed in the most flamboyant & virtuosic fashion even while employing soulful melodies, arching solos or unexpected dramatic effects from the players.
I happily play through the whole CD in my car, even if the latter two pieces (the trio and quartet #5) are my favorites. The trio is especially impressive. The second movement is a fandango in 6/8 that reminds me of the opening Bernard Herrmann wrote for North by Northwest, flamboyant, energetic, breath-taking. Just when you think you know who Klebanov is, he pulls back into something resembling a waltz, a bit of nostalgia Mahler would have approved of: before resuming the hair-raising chase worthy of Hitchcock. But for the next movement it’s moody and profound, more like Debussy or Ravel in its refusal to rush, self-possessed and confident. And the finale to this trio is like quicksilver, writing of gossamer fluidity. Again, just when I thought I saw where he was going with his ever darker phrases, we close with shimmering sonorities reminding me of Strauss or Korngold, a sweet glimpse of eternity.
For the Quartet #5 we’re in a more serious world, I think, less playful and more tightly controlled. There’s still melody but less of a need to entertain or be popular. Perhaps Klebanov felt he could safely express himself freely. The second movement sounds quite modern, as in modernist, reminding me of the despair in the orchestral introduction to Marie’s scene that opens the last act of Wozzeck, lost to the world and any clear tonal landmarks. Gradually we find our way into something more urgent, less Berg and more like Ravel in its willingness to play with us.
And then the finale seems like a parody of Schubert’s wild finale to his Death and the Maiden quartet, an acid trip with hell-hounds or the secret police in pursuit. Moods shift abruptly but deftly, the management of the materials so sophisticated as to take your breath away. I felt at times we were in the world of the late Mahler we hear in the 9th and 10th symphonies. In the last minute, has the nightmare finally caught up to us?
There’s a resolution but I can’t decide whether it’s happy or not. What do you think?
I will keep listening, and if I ever figure out the answer, I shall let you know.
I’m not a philosopher although I do enjoy asking questions.
“Longevity” has nine letters, including the six letters of “levity”. Is a sense of humour the secret to a long life?
All I know right now is that I’m confronted with such questions daily.
My mother is over 100. My dog Sam is fifteen: which is comparable when you adjust for the normal life expectancy. I know that neither Sam nor my mother will live forever. I wish I could forget.
I’m lucky, observing friends mourning the passing of dogs & humans in their families.
My mom writes playful rhymes that I’ve sometimes quoted in this blog. When she recites them I carefully take them down for posterity as though she were John Keats or George Faludy.
She keeps a straight face while reciting, totally deadpan even though she usually makes me laugh. Sometimes when she sees me laughing, she’ll join in.
Here are a couple of recent ones.
I am not young, I’ve passed my time But I could write some silly rhyme. Summer’s gone, it got so old The green leaves are turning gold. The gentle breeze is getting bold October is blowing cold I have time to watch it unfold.
My eyes are bad My ears are bad They’re connected to this old head And this old head Doesn’t like to stay too long in bed.
When I write her words down she will ask me if it’s worth the trouble, whether it’s not a waste. I’m just grateful to be able to hear her speak. She’s outlived her siblings, and her best friend. The last time I saw her, earlier this week, she was having some arthritis pain that afflicts her in a few places, and disturbs her sleep.
But she manages to stay positive even on her worst days. The least I can do is try to make her smile. She’s a perfect audience, because she’ll smile even when my jokes are bad, in appreciation for the effort.
Sometimes we play a game that I recall from my childhood, that later I would play with my daughter, a game that’s called “Squiggle”. The basic idea is that one person scribbles something that functions as a challenge to the other person: who must make something out of it. And then you trade, going back and forth either making the squiggle or turning the squiggle into a dubious work of art.
She made the shark, I made the duck and the Medusa figure
Sam behaves like a puppy. Of course she has no idea of her age. She has a big lump growing in her left thigh that keeps getting bigger.
The lump doesn’t seem to hurt her, thank goodness.
But she will flip over and roll on the grass, knowing that I can’t resist the implicit invitation to rub her tummy.
Perhaps the key is to ignore the calendar and just enjoy the moment. Sam is happy lying under the piano no matter how loudly I play.
Sam relaxing under the piano, while George tunes it.
It helps, whether listening to the piano being tuned or to my loudest pieces, that Sam has no concept of time.
Kaeja d’Dance presents: Laneway ART-ery Dances, a site-specific interactive digital installation. As part of ArtworxTO: Toronto’s Year of Public Art 2021-2022, two of Toronto’s alleyways will be animated with thought provoking contemporary dance. Launching on September 22, 2021 for a full year. Audiences can visit anytime at no cost.
Laneway ART-ery Dances features 4 short dance films including one augmented reality (AR) experience. All films can be accessed using a mobile device. The AR experience will ignite the dancers to appear as if they are dancing live in the laneway, allowing each audience member to become fully immersed in the installation. While Kaeja d’Dance has been creating dance films for many years, this is their first project to incorporate augmented reality technology. Both the films and the augmented reality experience can be viewed from any mobile device, making the performance personalized and safe to enjoy while adhering to COVID protocols. The dance films feature 7 professional dancers, 7 community participants, and a commissioned score by Edgardo Moreno.
“I see Laneway ART-ery Dances as an invitation to consider the many stories and experiences that pass through the alleys of Toronto. Images of passing vulnerability, strength, and resilience come forward in these works, as if these alleys hold the stories of all of those who pass through. This metaphor becomes apparent in the AR component. We see two wonderful dancers appear in the alley, but we can only witness them through the screen of our devices. It is like the camera of your device is able to harness the memories that live in the alley, memories that are impossible to experience through the naked eye.” – Mateo Galindo Torres, Artistic Producer
Laneway ART-ery Dances was funded by Toronto Arts Council and is part of ArtworxTO: Toronto’s Year of Public Art 2021–2022, a year-long celebration of Toronto’s exceptional public art collection and the creative community behind it. Working closely with artists and Toronto’s arts institutions, ArtworxTO will deliver major public art projects and commissions, citywide, from fall 2021 to fall 2022. Supporting local artists and new artworks that reflect Toronto’s diversity, ArtworxTO is creating more opportunities for citizens to engage with art in their everyday lives. The City of Toronto invites the public to discover creativity and community– everywhere. Visit artworxTO.ca for full details.
DATE: Launching Wednesday, September 22, 2021 to view until September 21, 2022. LOCATIONS: Alley 1: Broadcast Lane (Cabbage town) – Start at the north end of the lane (Winchester St) Alley 2: Ciamaga Lane (Seaton Village/ West Annex) – Start at the north end of the lane (Barton Ave)
CREDITS: CONCEPT AND CHOREOGRAPHY BY: Karen and Allen Kaeja DANCERS: Aria Evans, Nickeshia Garrick, Karen Kaeja, Mio Sakamoto, Elke Schroeder, Katherine Semchuk, Irma Villafuerte FILMS BY: Drew Berry and Allen Kaeja AR DESIGNERS: Mateo Galindo Torres, Jacob Niedźwiecki
ABOUT KAEJA d’DANCE Established in 1990, Kaeja is driven by two distinct artistic forces, Karen and Allen Kaeja. Kaeja creates award-winning contemporary dance performances for stage, film & communities that have toured the world. The foundation of their stage and film creation began with fifteen years of Holocaust inspired dance works. Allen is the child of a refugee and Holocaust survivor. Kaeja presents local and international dance artists in Toronto through festival platforms, commissions and mentorships, creating with people of all identities, practices and ages.
Passionate engagers of bridging professional and community dance art, Kaeja has received 40+ awards & nominations.
“Press releases and announcements” are presented verbatim without comment
I’ve just been to “a Radical Retelling” of As You Like it by Cree actor and playwright Cliff Cardinal at Crow’s Theatre. A story about someone banished into the forest after his property is stolen from him by his brother seems apt for adaptation by an Indigenous playwright.
Cliff Cardinal (photo: Dahlia Katz)
Cardinal’s work chases me back to other theories, recalling other approaches to Shakespeare and adaptation.
I see two theorists in natural opposition as east and west.
Maeterlinck and Meagher are opposites. Meagher breaks down the mechanics of how the personages would have been put on the stage of Shakespeare’s time in Shakespeare’s Shakespeare. It’s a book with a focus on dramaturgy, the works in context. He identifies the possible doublings in a play, for example The Fool and Cordelia in King Lear. I would never have known about this intriguing study had I not had the good fortune to hear Meagher in a classroom here in Toronto. If not Meagher, there are others one could read, taking comparable positions.
The opposite to Meagher’s pragmatism is Maurice Maeterlinck, the creator of The Intruder and Pelléas et Mélisande. His dramaturgy is the other extreme from live performance itself, having expressed his discomfort with the body of the actor, saying “The day we see Hamlet die in the theatre, something of him dies for us. He is dethroned by the spectre of an actor, and we shall never be able to keep the usurper out of our dreams.”. He would prefer to read a play than to see it. No wonder his works are so abstract, that he is a prototypical symbolist, avoiding theatricality like some kind of plague. Some of his plays had a quality identified as “monological”, where multiple characters might exchange words, while seeming to be communicating as though their thoughts came from the same head.
Okay, so I’ve described a polarity that’s my east and west, my left & right if you prefer, imagining four directions as we see in the spirit wheel. These two are the concrete bodies onstage, vs the imagined bodies in our heads as we read. The other two polarities I picture for Shakespeare (or any other author) have more to do with the question of the author’s meaning or intention. Now before you all start giggling at the idea that anyone can know intention, I merely raise that topic because some delve into such questions, while others would declare them irrelevant: suggesting another polarity.
The theorist whose analyses of Shakespeare (who he is, what he’s after, how to understand his work) have hit me most profoundly is Sky Gilbert in his study Shakespeare Beyond Science. He’s far from alone of course. As I mentioned in my review of Sky’s book last autumn, there are more books about Shakespeare than anyone in history, except for Jesus and Napoleon. Never mind all these books and their explanations, I’ve only invoked them as the opposite direction to Cliff Cardinal and others in his camp…
Let me mention another theorist, though, while speaking of Cliff. One of the strangest, dumbest, funniest moments in my academic career came when I presented a paper while sitting beside Linda Hutcheon, a humble scholar who was very gentle while more or less explaining why I was full of crap to a seminar room full of colleagues. I blush at the recollection. I was talking in my over-eager way about adaptation while looking at the whole question of how closely adaptations steer to their original, using the vague term “fidelity” while seeking something almost mathematical in its reductive precision. Linda very gently asked me why I thought an adaptation needed to be faithful at all. It was polite, but my jaw dropped at the question, at the possibility (ha…. or certainty?) that I was the old-fogey conservative in the room.
Whoops. And her question could very easily be a kind of footnote to Cliff’s bold work.
I suppose I came at it leading with my musical background, numbly aware (if that isn’t a complete oxymoron), that sometimes music is radically altered in its treatment, no longer something we’d call an “interpretation” but now having become through a series of changes (insertions, deletions, shifts of emphasis) a new text and such a new text as to require a shift in the attribution of authorship.
I think it’s a different question with Shakespeare than with a more recent author such as Maeterlinck. Shakespeare himself was regularly appropriating stories from other sources for his plays, in a time when plays were not yet published the way they are now: with declarations of copyright. Maeterlinck’s death is sufficiently distant to make his work public domain, but except for his early creations are largely forgotten now. It’s exciting to adapt and change something people know and recognize, not nearly so exciting when we don’t know the thing being adapted. Linda Hutcheon made a wonderful analogy for the excitement of adaptation, reminding us of the palimpsest, an old manuscript where something has been written over top. If the old thing showing through the layers is unknown to us? the adaptation won’t have the same torque, won’t even be intelligible as adaptation, because we won’t recognize the part that’s from the earlier thing, mixed with the new thing overlaid.
When does it stop being Shakespeare, and become for example, Cardinal? I was thinking of this earlier today while playing a couple of of Busoni’s Bach transcriptions, pieces that are barely Bach once Busoni gets his big hands on the ideas.
But Bach is still visible through Busoni’s overlay. What if we can’t easily discern the original in the adapted version?
That’s the challenge of any adaptation and is surely part of the fun.
A Dora-award winning multidisciplinary artist of Pakistani descent, Zorana Sadiq creates work that is wide ranging and spans different types of performance, including theatre, television, chamber music, contemporary music, and opera. Zorana is currently a Creator in Residence at Crow’s Theatre working on her solo show, MixTape.
If you’ve ever made a mix-tape that title pushes your buttons. Déjà vu! I remember the tape I made when I was just getting to know my wife. At one time a mix tape could be like a bouquet of flowers or a love-letter, to introduce yourself romantically, intimately to someone you wanted to know: romantically, intimately.
Sadiq has performed extensively in Canada and the United States alongside many of classical music’s leading conductors including Bramwell Tovey, Robert Spano, and Alex Pauk, and has appeared with Music Toronto at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, Vancouver Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, Boston Musica Viva, and New York’s Da Capo Chamber Players.
I’m intrigued that a serious theatre and musical artist like Zorana delves into her own deeper musical self with MixTape.
Are you more like your father or your mother?
Both and neither. And I’d say mostly neither. I have a child of my own now, and see and recognize in myself the tendency to want to point-out personality inheritance, but really, they are their own thing. I think if you grow up in a turbulent house, which I did, you spend a lot of time trying to create yourself in relief to your parental influences, if that makes sense. And of course, that is only so successful, but you do it anyway.
Zorana Sadiq
What is the best or worst thing about what you do?
I consider myself very lucky to be able to express myself through a number of mediums. In a sense, they are all fueled by an essential need to communicate and share ideas and beauty- but they require different “muscles”. Singing, acting, teaching and writing are great joys for me, and a life spent jockeying between them keeps me feeling well-played. I never feel like I’m static or in a rut.
The promotion for MixTape says “Can you think of the first song you played over and over again? The first song that you would take the time to rewind on the cassette tape, because it was worth it.”My first song was either Mamas & the Papas’ “This is dedicated to the one I love” or maybe “Strawberry Fields” by the Beatles . Let me ask you Zorana ”what was the first song you listened to over and over?”
I discovered the joys of lifting music when I was in grade seven and so I played a recording of Fauré’s Pavane over and over so that I could learn the notes on my flute. The cassette-which was that light beige color, was an EMI classical compilation of some kind. It’s funny that I can remember the “gist” of the cassette itself, but that haunting, dotted melody of the piece is still fresh in my mind.
This is a pre-recorded cassette. Somewhere in the house there’s a precious mixtape…misplaced, forgotten until now. I could only find pre-recorded cassettes like this one. (((sigh)))
I would say a close second to the Fauré was Michael Jackson’s I Just Can’t Stop Loving You. I had a whooooole thing going on around that song.
What ability or skill do you wish you had, that you don’t have?
I wish I was fearless. I admire people who do the thing first, and consider the possible disasters afterwards.
When you’re just relaxing and not working, what is your favourite thing to do?
Cook. Bake, specifically. This pandemic forced us all to make special occasions within our houses, and food was a natural way for us to do that.
I also love to read, and find that when I’m working on something- memorizing a score, learning lines- I lose my absorptive powers. So when I can really dive into a book- it’s delicious for me.
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More questions about Zorana Sadiq’s new show MixTape that will be presented by Crow’s Theatre beginning November 9th.
Talk about your relationship with tapes and taping. When did you first make a tape and what was on it?
I got my own double cassette recorder in my early teens, and was hooked. I remember the sound seemed so full and expansive, even though it was just a regular boom box. Maybe because it fillllled up my room in a way that made me feel the space was really mine. Mix tapes became a huge thing for me, and something about waiting for songs to come on so you could grab them from the radio made it more magical. Like fate was involved in waiting for A-HA’s ” Take on Me” to come on.
Tapes have all kinds of obvious disadvantages. The sound quality isn’t great, they are slow to work with, they wear out. But they also were very democratic. Nothing was hidden away that you had to be an expert to manage. I always like how very close the music was to me with cassettes.
My mix tapes were very eclectic. I wanted ebb and flow and variety. It’s not that dissimilar from programming recitals, actually. And I think you can introduce new things to listeners in the way that you chose the sequence of your songs by building momentum, or by surrounding a new piece in the familiar.
It’s one of our first curatorial tasks as young people.
Does a mixtape reflect the person who makes it?
I say in the show that making a mixtape is like decorating your locker. It can be used to express who you are. It can also be a love letter, or a shared joy between friends. It’s hard to give a friend music anymore these days, with everything being digital. Sharing a playlist isn’t as personal, I think.
I always listened to a pretty big range of music, my ear was restless like that.
Crow’s Theatre announced your “Creation Residency” earlier this year, as part of “a new slate of original theatre, podcast, screen-based and multi-platform projects-in-development.” Talk for a moment about your experience with Crow’s and Artistic Director Chris Abraham, who directs your show.
Chris Abraham, Artistic Director, Crow’s Theatre
Seven years ago I did a concert of my first loves, Prince and Kate Bush- arranged for classical soprano and a small chamber ensemble. (Peter Tiefenbach, Joe Macerollo and Tim Francom were my partners in crime on that show.) It was an itch that I had had for a while. As a young soprano, I had always admired Cathy Berberian and Teresa Stratas. I loved how they negotiated surprising repertoire with their beautiful classical voices.
Interacting with those early musical loves within the paradigm of a classical soprano gave me pause. I didn’t speak at all, in that concert, which is rare for me- I like to chat between sets in a regular recital to draw the audience into the music. But in that case, it was just the music. But, it left me restless. Once all those things were out on the table, my voice, the training, the pop songs, my feelings about the artists themselves- I could feel tug to make some more meaning of all of these parts of my musical self.
Nina Lee Aquino
I also had an early push of encouragement from my dear friend, Factory AD Nina Lee Aquino, who said after that concert: “You know there’s a show in there, right?” Factory also gave me the very first writing grant I got for this piece, and Matt McGeachy at Factory was my first introduction to the blessed role of a dramaturge.
So, I wrote on and off for three years. Hashing it all out as best I could.
Chris Abraham heard about my script and asked me to read it to him last summer. I had been writing for so long that it was a relief to have the words outside of myself, in the air. Shortly after that, I was invited to do the residency and that’s when our work began.
Our first dramaturgy sessions were a lot about activating my unconscious to write, to color-in the person in between all of the music- which I had previously been sheepish about. We would talk and talk and he would point out things in my story that activated my thoughts and theories about sound. One of Chris’ many strengths is his ability to see larger patterns in a story. I feel very lucky that he was my dramaturge for this play. He has a special kind of curiosity that disarms the storyteller.
I also did early workshops experimenting with sound and music and how it might function to continue the narrative of the writing itself.
Thomas Ryder Payne, the sound designer for this show, also has very hungry ears.
Thomas Ryder Payne
In our work we have run the gamut of how much and what kind of musical information aids and abets us in this play. We do want the audience to feel a sense of their own instrumentality.
Could you give us some idea of what sort of work to expect with Mixtape? Is it a musical, or a play or something else?
MixTape is a play. A travelogue of sorts through a life lived through my ears, trying to figure out how best to be heard. I hope that the audience will relate to this journey we all take, to be known to ourselves, so that we radiate that outward in our lives.
I tell the story with my voice.
Is this a good time to be growing up with the media we have available? Is it harder or easier in our digital – social media era than it might have been working with cassettes?
I think this was covered above. I also don’t want to stray into judgement about digital music- it does feel limiting to me, but that is my personal experience. It has also made music more available for the curious listener. I can say that an algorithm choosing songs for a playlist frightens me a bit. The streamlining of tastes by a corporate hand also worries me.
But I do have faith, particularly in young people, that in the end, if music matters to them, they will be guided by their own tastes.
The promo for this show says the following: For writer, performer, and musician Zorana Sadiq (Towards Youth, Crow’s Theatre), sound is our first, last, and most influential sense. In the world premiere of her new solo show MixTape, directed by Crow’s Theatre Artistic Director Chris Abraham, Sadiq invites her audience into a life experienced through sounds and an obsession with making them. Please tell us more about your philosophy and what you would hope to achieve in your art and your life.
I think we all come out of the box as instruments. Human instruments. And for a time, we all make the sounds just as we feel them. The sounds that babies make are astonishing in their eloquence. Eventually most of us learn to speak, and thus begins the cultivating of our instruments. For singers, we take this a step further, training our voices to sound different ways, to have a bigger set of knobs and dials.
I think the answer to WHY we seek to do this, and what we think we will achieve is one of the central investigations of the play.
Is there a teacher or an influence you’d care to name that you especially admire?
I have been so very fortunate in my life to have great teachers and incredible mentors. To start, my high school music teacher, Leon Racine planted an early seed around the purpose of music, and encouraged us to improvise and activate our generative, creative selves.
I was very lucky to have studied with Susanne Mentzer at the Aspen Festival. She gave me the real goods on the cost of holding back when you are singing.
I got to work with Dawn Upshaw when I was a fellow at Tanglewood and she really epitomizes for me the singing actor. Communication burned through all of the beautiful notes she sang and it really left its mark on me.
As an actor, one of my first theatre gigs was in Tout Comme Elle- which Luminato produced, with a cast of 50 intergeneration woman. I don’t know how I got cast, but it was like school for me. The cast was stacked with the best actors in the country. That was my syllabus: Kristen Thompson, Akosua Amo Adem, Liisa Repo Martel, Tanja Jacobs, Lili Francks, Anusree Roy. I was very grateful to get to work in that forest of fabulousness.
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MixTape opens November 9th at the Guloien Theatre 345 Carlaw Avenue. For further information click here.
In addition, I’ve heard that MixTape will be the first show of the season to be filmed and then edited for digital broadcast following the live run. The streaming dates are December 2 – 19. For more information click here.
If asked to identify the two most reliable performers for the Canadian Opera Company over the past decade, you might well come up with the singers chosen to launch the COC’s “season like no other”.
I remember Russell Braun’s Chou En Lai from Nixon in China on the Met high definition broadcast a little over ten years ago, as though it were just yesterday. I still think of Russell’s voice as youthful, as apt for Prince Andrei (in War and Peace), Pelléas, Ford (in Falstaff), or Louis Riel, even though he can also play a mature role such as Don Alfonso in Cosi fan tutte. It’s a given that he’ll bring dramatic intelligence to whatever he sings, the focus of whatever he does for the COC.
Baritone Russell Braun
Tamara Wilson has emerged as a star on the world stage, and we were fortunate to watch her development here in Toronto. Like Russell, she’s often at the dramatic heart of whatever she’s doing, not just a beautiful voice. While the pandemic made us miss her Aida, we did get her Turandot and Desdemona, two recent high marks at the COC.
For my money, the real leader of the COC over the past decade has been their music director Johannes Debus, as the orchestra has fearlessly undertaken the most challenging works. We hear a remarkable versatility, in the subtleties of Handel or Mozart, the endurance tests of Wagner’s Ring or Tristan und Isolde¸ 20th century scores such as Peter Grimes, Louis Riel, Elektra or Dialogues of the Carmelites. Whatever the orchestra is doing the singers are in good hands, as are the composers. And we the listeners have been blessed.
This trio of Tamara, Russell, Johannes (leading the COC orchestra of course), with Perryn Leech as our master of ceremonies, took us for a test drive of the new virtual Four Seasons Centre. Government funding has given us –speaking of Canada collectively—the ability to watch and listen to concerts and operas at the Four Seasons Centre that used to require your attendance in person.
COC General Director Perryn Leech as our M.C.
What does it sound like, I wondered…?
When I used to buy stereo equipment, I’d go to the store, perhaps carrying a record or two along, to audition the systems. When you buy a car you take it for a test-drive, to see what it feels like when you step on the gas, turn a corner, push the brakes.
The concert from the COC is like our test drive or our audition, to find out what it looks like and feels like.
We assume that the COC has expertise: -all those singers who know how to sing a high note or a low note, in English, Italian, German, French, Russian, Czech, Hungarian,… -all those orchestral musicians playing -all those costumes & sets designed and built to tell a story
But the technicians recording and transmitting the performance from the Four Seasons Centre?
At the controls
Perhaps they have had a chance to practice. Even so they are still getting accustomed to their new toy. This concert is more than a test drive, more than a dress rehearsal. They need to know how to shift gears, how to handle the equivalent to potholes in the road. While you might prefer to slow your car down, this is a high-performance situation. The soprano must hit that loud high note. How do you capture that without distortion? What microphones or cameras capture that best? Are there sweet spots on the stage where the acoustic is a bit better or worse? Does it matter whether they’ve put a set behind the singer, or whether the orchestra is blasting along at the same time..? You only find that out by using the space, the musicians, the voices: and hearing the results. Perhaps the hall itself should be thought of as another instrument that the technicians will be playing, with interpretive choices to be made, as a producer mixing a recording faces choices. Do you push the bass to give it oomph, or perhaps the treble to help us discern the details of the text or the textures of the orchestra? Is it better with fewer microphones?
This is also your chance to try it out, especially if we’re missing the place, missing opera. There is no audience visible, no applause to be heard. Not for the first time, I am thinking that the canned laughter & applause for television back in the 50s & 60s wasn’t so dumb, in seeking to make the experience a bit more real. I used to think that their intention was to persuade us that Lucy and Ricky were funny. But now I’m thinking they also wanted us to accept the televised reality, as a performance for an audience, which is just as important. If I hear vissi d’arte without applause, have I really heard the aria? The sound of an audience as a presence in the theatre, receiving and enjoying the performance validates the reality, as a part of live opera.
But the cameras and microphones offer compensations, closeup opportunities we would never have in a live setting.
I was delighted at the choice of “Dich teure Halle” as the first piece to be sung.
Soprano Tamara Wilson, Johannes Debus and the COC Orchestra
Elisabeth’s aria speaks for all of us in her enthusiasm to be back in her beloved hall of singing: aka Four Seasons Centre. Tamara’s joy seemed genuine.
Soprano Tamara Wilson
The camera panning the hall at the end was perfectly appropriate, even if I wish we had a full hall instead. But that’s in the future. For now we will have to be content with the online version available online until Friday, March 25, 2022. Tickets for the in-person offerings (three operas February – May 2022) go on sale October 14th. You can find the virtual concert and discover more about the COC’s upcoming programming at their website, coc.ca.
barczablog 