2013 Program:
Our 2013 scenes are focused around women’s stories. We are thrilled to be presenting the following fantastic, timely, challenging, beautiful, Canadian works, each adapted to fit our unique ensemble:
Rosa by James Rolfe and Camyar Chai
Isabelle has fled from her home and husband after the death of their child. Hector finds her in a brothel, where she has retreated in order to forget, and desperately urges her to return.
Little Miss All Canadian by Lemit Beecher and Liza Balkan
A miniature opera that was written at this year’s Composer-Librettist Laboratory (LibLab) at Tapestry. Two mothers hilariously coach their daughters from the sidelines of a beauty pageant while they discover a disturbing article in the paper: an eleven-year-old girl’s dismembered body parts have been discovered in a park.
Cake by Monica Pearce
This twelve-minute comedic opera premiered in January 2012 at the Toy Piano Composers’ Opera Scenesters concert. A bride-to-be barely navigates her family’s relationships and expectations as she attempts to order the perfect cake for her wedding.
The Enslavement and Liberation of Oksana G.by Aaron Gervais
and Colleen Murphy
This scene served as the genesis for the larger work but does not exist in the full-scale opera. A woman from Eastern Europe had been forced into prostitution, but manages to escape to Italy. She finds herself at a safe house run by a priest and has begun the process of recovery. One night, she enters the priest’s room to look out the window at the moon. He wakes up and they begin discussing her situation, the possibility of returning home, and their relationship.
Trahisons liquides - excerpt by Stacey Brown & Sébastien Harrisson
Set on the Hibernia oil platform located off the east coast of Newfoundland, Pierre, a neurologist is conducting research on the reactions of the human brain under water. Nora, a deep-sea welder, is one of Pierre’s research subjects and the two become romantically involved. Nora encounters the spirit of a long dead pilot, who mistakes her for her past lover, and Pierre manipulates his authority to keep Nora close.
Slip – excerpts by Juliet Palmer and Anna Chatterton – Fall Apart, Wishes
Slip was created as a site-specific performance for the Harrison Baths, Toronto’s only public bathing complex. Connecting to homelessness, the piece also explores how we are bound together by the intimate experience of cleansing and our precious connection to water and how women experience interaction in intimate spaces.
2012 Program:
Golden Boy - Darren Russo & Anusree Roy
What happens when a librettist and composer are thrown together at opera-writing boot camp? In 2011 librettist Anusree Roy and composer Darren Russo met at Tapestry New Opera’s LibLab, a one-week workshop where composers and librettists explore an intensely collaborative process of writing opera scenes. “Golden Boy” is one of the shinies that emerged from that period. Tackling the subject of broken families, this scene is a tough breakfast time conversation between a boy and his mother.
At Another Table - Adam Scime & Larissa Koniuk
Meera visits a coffee shop to think, write, perhaps meet someone, but is unprepared for the flood of experience a young woman like herself can encounter in a café like this one. A collaboration between resident composer Adam Scime (co-composer of Rob Ford: The Opera), Larissa Koniuk and Nadia Chana.
Seagull Aria (from Rob Ford: The Opera) – Anna Höstman & MIchael Albano
A Walmart at the Toronto waterfront? This is a distraught seagull’s response to the idea. Rob Ford: The Opera, a surrealist, absurdist, local opera about Toronto’s infamous mayor, had crowds cheering wildly at its premiere earlier this year. (Who wouldn’t love to see Margaret Atwood appear as an angel and conduct the arts-hating Ford to Judgement Day?).
Hannah and Paige and the Zombie Pirates - Chris Thornborrow
Hannah comes over to play at Paige’s house only to discover that Roosevelt the teddy-bear has been abducted by zombie pirates! In a play-adventure they make up on the fly, the girls set to sea, firing cannons, losing limbs, fighting octopi, battling the zombie pirates in hand-to-hand-combat, even surviving a hurricane. Will they ever recover their beloved Roosevelt? First premiered at the University of Toronto, this short opera scene is Chris Thornborrow’s first operatic work.
Sewing the Earthworm – Brian Harman & David Brock
A woman cuts an earthworm in half while gardening, and decides that she must sew it back together to save its life. Suffering from rapidly deteriorating motor-control and having been told by doctors that her mind would be the next to go, sewing the earthworm back together becomes her obsession. “Sewing the Earthworm” was originally a larger cycle of songs for concert performance. It has been condensed and staged for the Bicycle Opera Project.
Shelter (Act 1) – Juliet Palmer & Julie Salverson
Here’s a little peek at a new full-length work to be premiered jointly by Edmonton Opera and Tapestry New Opera in November! Shelter tells both of a nuclear family with a glowing daughter, and of nuclear physicist Lise Meitner, an overlooked figure in the history of nuclear fission. This first scene is about flirtation, flirtation with the dangerous beauty of science and the dangerous beauty of human beings.
