a cappella opera for 5 soloists (2 sop, mezzo, bar) and chorus SSAAA [70’] 2016; film 2023.

Librettist: Anna Chatterton
Commissioner: Soundstreams Canada
Funders: Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts

Sweat film (2023)

Sweat merges contemporary dance and operatic storytelling with evocative and striking imagery. Filmed in raw factory spaces, Sweat tells the story of a group of women working in the garment industry and sets their individual aspirations against the demands of global capitalism.

Producer: Bicycle Opera Project
Director Jennifer Nichols Cinematographer Ash Tailor Music Director Geoffrey Sirett
Featuring: Stephanie Tritchew, Larissa Koniuk, Catherine Daniel, Keith Lam, Caitlin Wood, Justine Owen, Erica Iris, Alex Beley, Cindy Won, Dedra McDermott, Miyeko Ferguson, Carleen Zouboules
Funding: Canada Council for the Arts

Producer: Bicycle Opera Project
Director Baņuta Rubess conductor Geoffrey Sirrett choreographer Jennifer Nichols designer Sonja Rainey lighting Kai Masaoka stage manager Julia Howman
Featuring: Stephanie Tritchew, Keith Lam, Larissa Koniuk and Catherine Daniel
Chorus: Cindy Won, Caitlin Wood, Justine Owen, Stephanie Tritchew and Emma Char

New York Premiere Production (2016)

Producer: Center for Contemporary Opera in cooperation with Urbanvessel.
National Sawdust, New York, October 26-27, 2016.
Director Giselle Ty conductor Lidiya Kankovskaya choreographer Nicole Pearce set design Frank Oliva costumes Asa Benally lighting Bruce Steinberg stage manager Jeromy Hunt
Featuring: Larissa Koniuk, Shabnam Kalbasi, Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek, Patrick McNally and Eric McKeever
Chorus: Isabella Dawis, Katya Gruzglina, Leanne Gonzalez-Singer, Christine Duncan and Hanne Dollase

Program note:

“Made in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Italy, China, India…the U.S.A.”  Who sews our clothes, who makes our shoes? Where do they live? How much are they paid? What would you dream of, sewing sleeves all day? Is life better in the village you left behind? Sweat is a kaleidoscope of characters and stories collected from factories around the world. Plunging headfirst into the ethical conundrums of the garment trade, the work offers a window into the lives of the unseen millions who work to clothe us and the high-flying designers whose fantasies feed the fashion industry.

Photos: Dahlia Katz, Bicycle Opera Production

dance opera for 3 vocalists, 2 dancers & chamber ensemble [50’] 2017.
counter-tenor, baritone, Carnatic vocalist, flute, clarinet, percussion, portative organ, hurdy-gurdy, violin & cello.

Premiere: Toronto Masque Theatre, Crow’s Theatre, Toronto, March 10-11, 2017

Librettist: Anna Chatterton
Commissioner: Toronto Masque Theatre
Funders: Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts
Production: choreographer Hari Krishnan, director Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière, conductor Larry Beckwith, set & costume design Rex, lighting Gabriel Cropley
Featuring: Scott Belluz (counter-tenor), Alex Samaras (baritone) & Subhiksha Rangarajan; Ravyn Wngz & Sze-Yang Ade-Lam (dancers)

Program note:
Unwilling to marry a woman, a man fashions a lover from his own left side. He’s enraptured by her perfect beauty – a mirror of his own – until he discovers that this new woman longs for freedom and wildly desires another. 

South Asian and Baroque music and performance traditions meet in a new masque based on a traditional Indian folk tale (from A.K. Ramanujan’s A Flowering Tree). A powerful & timely allegory of the female and male warring within, told through music, words and movement.

Composer’s Note:
Just when you think you’ve grasped it, the story slithers away like a snake — that’s what keeps me fascinated. What seems like a familiar “woman born of man” creation story gets a feminist twist: the Newborn Woman outfoxes the Prince and heads off into a blissful future of new lovers. The tale comes from Karnataka in South India, where elements of matriarchal culture still play out in family structures. It’s not a myth, but a folk tale handed down from one generation of women to the next. It could be understood perhaps as a story of consolation for women enduring the hardships of life in a man’s world.

On a more personal note, the tale suggests the need to find a balance between what we might understand as the masculine and the feminine within each of us — to seek a more nuanced understanding of gender. The Prince locks up and limits the Newborn Woman — the Other — keeping what is different at a suspicious distance. In contrast, the Lover and the Newborn Woman fall in love through a gentle process of listening and exchange. The Lover uses imagination to understand what the Newborn Woman is telling him. Unlike The Prince, who imposes an idealized femininity onto the Woman, the Lover listens, waits and understands. Openness to difference and generosity of imagination transform our encounters with “the Other”, both within our selves and in the wider world.

Image: Sze-Yang Ade-Lam & Ravyn Wngz (photo by Kakumi Mori)

chamber opera for mezzo, percussion & electronics [20’] 2016.

Presenter: Opera Peepshow
Premiere: Christine Duncan (mezzo) and Jean Martin (percussion & electronics), Baņuta Rubess (dramaturge). Campbell House, Toronto April 28-39, 2016.
Lyrics: Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein with additional found and verbatim text

Program note:

Boots invites you into a boudoir full of guilty pleasures — starring singer Christine Duncan and her precious footwear. Accompanied by percussionist Jean Martin, Christine presents a cast of more than thirty pairs of boots, procured over the last decade from secondhand stores, online auctions and retail outlets. She adds to her obsessive collection weekly. When will it stop?

chamber opera — 5 singers (sop, 2 mez, ten, bar) + ensemble (cl/bcl, egtr, perc, pf, vn, db) [80’] 2012.

Commissioner: Tapestry New Opera
Funders: The Ontario Arts Council, The Canada Council for the Arts and Tapestry New Opera
Premiere: Edmonton Opera, November 16-20, 2012
Performers (2012, Edmonton): Christine Duncan, Andrea Ludwig, Maghan McPhee, Peter McGillivray, Keith Klassen
Performers (2014, Toronto): Christine Duncan, Andrea Ludwig, Teiya Kasahara, Andrew Love, Keith Klassen
Librettist: Julie Salverson
Production: direction Keith Turnbull, design Sue Page, movement Jo Leslie, video & lighting Beth Kates and Ben Chaisson

Program note: Shelter: a nuclear family adrift in the atomic age. Since Prometheus stole fire from the gods, we have flirted with the dangerous beauty of science. In the invisible shadow of Fukushima, how will we survive when knowledge so outstrips understanding? In this fable a father protects his family at any cost, a mother chases storms and a nuclear physicist is midwife to a child who glows in the dark. When the dashing Pilot enters, our world is forever altered.

Composer’s note: The Cold War hovered over my childhood, threatening imminent catastrophe and planetary doom. Growing up in New Zealand was no guarantee of safety — the governments of France, the U.K. and the U.S.A. all conducted nuclear tests in the Pacific Ocean. This was brought home in 1985 when I heard the explosive boom as the French government bombed the Greenpeace vessel The Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour. Skip ahead fifteen years and I became a citizen of Canada, a country with a strikingly different atomic history. The lights in my house are powered by nuclear power and my neighbourhood in Toronto hosts a uranium fuel pellet processing plant. At night I lie in bed listening to the haunting sound of train whistles and wonder if another shipment of uranium has arrived from the west. In some sense we all live along the Highway of the Atom and everywhere is downwind. Tripping over tailings and bogged down in radioactive mud, perhaps laughter and beauty will cause us to linger a moment and consider which path leads us out of this mess.

operatic staging of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale for 2 operatic soloists — sop + bar, 2 traditional singers, 2 SATB choirs, traditional drummers and chamber ensemble – cl/bcl, pf, perc, vn, db [150’] 2011.

Commissioner: Jumblies Theatre Company
Funder: Canada Council for the Arts
Premiere: Jumblies Theatre Company, director Varrick Grimes, soloists Doug MacNaughton (baritone) and Neema Bickersteth (soprano), Rosary Spence (First Nations singer), Sharada Eswar (Carnatic singer), Toronto, December 8-18, 2011.
Concept: Ruth Howard
Program note:

Like an Old Tale has drawn me into a world in which hundreds of people from all over the world retell an old story through sound, text, movement and image. How can music help or hinder our understanding of each other? Over the last year and a half we’ve worked together to create a musical world which makes room for different cultural traditions and skills. Some moments are soundscapes, while others are clearly operatic and driven by the vocal line. There have been break-through moments: the Bohemian chorus’ gutsy embrace of the call and response of the Daffodil song; Sharada singing Katrinile Varum Geetham while the Sicilian Choir sing a lament; Rosary and Sharada spinning a double lullaby together over the musical bed of the ensemble; mridangam drummer Sarma joining the groove in Rosary’s Water Song. When we read through the outline of the piece in the summer, I was struck by the compelling voices of children and seniors speaking passages from Shakespeare’s text: these extraordinary words are the bedrock of our collaboration. I am indebted to the generous contributions of Sharada Eswar and Rosary Spence, whose songs weave their way through the piece, and to the band (Adam, Adam, Aleksander, Alex and Martin) whose improvisations summon the Badlands and Bohemia. Thanks to everyone for giving voice to this new world!

a fusion of dance, boxing, & opera [60’] 2010.

Music: Juliet Palmer
Choreography: Julia Aplin
Text: Anna Chatterton
Premiere: Urbanvessel with Vilma Vitols, Neema Bickersteth, Savoy Howe, Christine Duncan, Anna Chatterton, Julia Aplin & Juliet Palmer, World Stage, Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, November 10-14, 2010.
Commissioner: World Stage, Harbourfront Centre
Funders: Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, Roger D. Moore & Harbourfront Centre Fresh Ground new works.

Program note:

During the research and development of Voice-Box we learned that Canadian women were not allowed to box until 1991. Lawyer and aspiring boxer Jenny Reid not only won that right for women, but fought the first sanctioned match against Thérèse Robitaille in Nova Scotia. It wasn’t until last year that women were granted permission to box in the upcoming 2012 Olympics. This is a huge breakthrough as the last time women boxed at the Olympics was in 1904 at a demonstration match. Savoy Howe generously supplied us with stories about being a female boxer in a world of men, the discrimination and eventual support she and other female boxers experienced.

Voice-Box celebrates and encourages women who choose to scrap it out, to display strength, sweat and skill, punching like a girl, fighting ugly but fighting fair, in the ring and in the world.

— Julia Aplin, Anna Chatterton and Juliet Palmer.

a cappella opera [40′] 2008.

Commissioner: The Theatre Centre, Toronto
Premiere: Vilma Vitols, Neema Bickersteth, Christine Duncan & Patricia O’Callaghan, FreeFall Festival/World Stage, The Theatre Centre, Toronto, March 12-16, 2008.
Creative Team: music Juliet Palmer, libretto Anna Chatterton, choreography Marie-Josée Chartier, direction Ruth Madoc-Jones, design Sarah Armstrong, lighting Kimberly Purtell
Awards: Dora nominations “Outstanding New Opera” and “Outstanding Production” (2008)
Funders: The Toronto Arts Council, The Ontario Arts Council, The Canada Council for the Arts, The Ontario Arts Council Theatre Creator’s Reserve and The Theatre Centre.

Preview in NOW Magazine, May 2010.

Stitch was developed in residence at The Theatre Centre and funded by The Ontario Arts Council, The Toronto Arts Council, and The Canada Council for the Arts.
Program note:

From the abuse of the sweatshop to the fantasy of costume and the empowerment of sewing-it-yourself, the sewing machine has been a force for liberation and exploitation since its invention in the 19^th century. Hemmed in by the language of sewing and the inexorable rhythm of the machine, three women fight to find space for imagination and individuality. Stitch gives voice to the unseen women who clothe us all.

site-specific performance for 3 singers, percussion and dancers [60’] 2006.

Funders: The Laidlaw Foundation, the Ontario Arts Council, The Toronto Arts Council, and the City of Toronto.
Premiere: Urbanvessel with Susanne Chui, Louis Laberge-Côté, Jean Martin, Christine Duncan, Aki Takahashi and Vilma Vitols, Harrison Baths. X Avant Festival, Toronto, September 20-22, 2006.
Creative Team: music Juliet Palmer, choreography Yvonne Ng, lyrics Anna Chatterton, installation Christie Pearson.
Program note:

Slip is a site-specific performance for a swimming pool or bath house fusing sound, movement and light. Urbanvessel investigates each new performance site, reflecting the users and the history of the space, and evoking its latent drama, dream spaces and stories. Each production of Slip is unique, but builds on our previous performances. Cultures with distinct architectures and social rituals of bathing are juxtaposed to increase awareness of our own histories. As humans we are bound together by the intimate experience of cleansing and our precious connection to water.

In 2006 Slip travelled the labyrinth of Toronto’s Harrison Baths complex: from the tiled lobby, through the gargantuan men’s locker room, to the majestic pool, and finally, through the series of intimate rooms making up the women’s space.

interdisciplinary performance for mezzo-soprano, piano & dancer [50’] 2001.

Funders: The Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, Laidlaw Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts
Premiere: Vilma Vitols, Ya-wen Wang, Susan Macpherson, Open Ears Festival, Kitchener, Canada, May 6, 2001.
Credits: music & concept Juliet Palmer, choreography Bill James, lighting Paul Mathiesen, costume Evelyn von Michalofski, video Nick de Pencier, set design Juliet Palmer, Paul Mathiesen & Evelyn von Michalofski.
Additional credits: Am Meer (1828) for voice and piano — Franz Schubert; Venus of the South Seas (1924) starring Annette Kellerman — dir. James R. Sullivan; excerpts from How To Swim (1918) — Annette Kellerman; recorded voice: Gladys Boyce.
Program note:

As a teenager in the 1920s, my grandmother Gladys played piano for silent films in the remote New Zealand town of Takaka. She still recalls a film which was shot nearby at Pohara beach. Although Glad has never seen the film, I found out later that it was the underwater spectacular Venus of the South Seas, starring Australian diver Annette Kellerman. A trained classical musician, Kellerman’s stage performances combined piano, violin and vocal recitals, along with high-diving and underwater stunts.

Flotsam & Jetsam weaves together memories of my grandmother with the fantastical watery world of Annette Kellerman. This performance is dedicated to my grandmother, Gladys Boyce.