A Globe and Mail Preview

Pick up a copy of today's Globe and Mail for a great preview of A Synonym for Love from Kate Taylor:

BISEXUALITY, LOVE TRIANGLES AND HIPSTERS: THIS IS HANDEL?

Deborah Baic/Globe and Mail

Soprano Tracy Smith Bessette is lying on a bed at the Gladstone Hotel, caressing a whip, a gag and a dildo. To be sure, she's preparing to play a lover in a hotel-room tryst, but she is also about to start singing a song that Handel originally wrote for gamboling shepherds and shepherdesses.

...

"I love the fact it's completely different from what we normally expect from Handel," [Ashiq] Aziz said this week during a break in rehearsals. "We are breaking all sorts of rules," [Ross] Manson added. "Handel purists will not be happy."

Read the full article here. A Synonym for Love opens Monday, August 20.

More Instagramming, More Teasing

A few more iPhone shots from our move-in days at The Gladstone. Just a little tease of Julie Fox's incredible venue transformation...

peeking in on Ross in the ballroom

the beginnings of a very glamourous destination on the 2nd floor

saucy boudoir accessories

bringing the outside in...

cuddly?

our audience guides fooling around in the secret room
(only a third of the audience gets to visit this space!)

huge instrument

our home for the next two weeks

A Little Tease...

Here you go...our first teaser of A Synonym for Love!

*audio captured via hand-held recorder at an early voice rehearsal at Dovercourt House.

Instagramming Behind the Scenes

A few shots snapped behind the scenes from rehearsals and load ins...

new fangled tuner for an old fangled instrument.

carpet install...such a sickly shade of pink

impromptu flyer display in Kensington Market

production manager Doug Morum surveys legs on ladders

first day of rehearsal: maquettes and a harpsichord

glamourous new digs for our orchestra

last year for Volcano it was White Rabbit, Red Rabbit...
this year: white sheets, purple rabbit dildo....

Marjorie Chan and Derek Kwan, two sweaty audience Handel-ers
(for some reason, that pun hasn't caught on...yet)

an underground / orchestra

Staging Baroque: What is Correct?

A scene from Hippolyte et Aricie at Opera de Paris
Photo Agathe Poupeney/Opera National de Paris

In a recent article for The New York Times, Zachary Woolfe takes a look at recent restagings of Baroque operas and asks some very big questions about the decisions artists make when they put these classics onstage.

Perhaps the hardest question to answer: was this production correct?

The Baroque repertory, Woolfe writes, is defined by its precision and stylistic rigor (its correctness). But executing that today without a point of reference is a huge challenge for contemporary opera artists.

"Most can agree that there are elements that should be present in Baroque opera, broad principles that should be observed, like the tension between restraint and release, the exhilaration of spectacle, both embrace of artifice and depth of feeling. But there is no agreement about how to observe them. It took many decades and the arduous work of Baroque opera's advocates to insert the works of the period firmly in the contemporary repertory. They won. Now what?"

"Baroque style was about illusion and extravagance, and opera - then a new medium, multidimensional and multisensory - was perhaps its ideal form. Yet it is nearly impossible now to imagine the stimulation provided by theatrical performance in a world far more visually and sonically muted than our own, just as it is hard to imagine the impact Beethoven's symphonies had when they were the loudest sounds their listeners heard all year....Should performances of Baroque opera seek to recapture the dazzling impact these works once had? If so, how? The same effects wouldn't astonish in the same way now, so should it involve reinvention? Or should the goal of productions be a kind of scrupulous conservation, a presentation of the operas as they were that lets audiences fill in the difference?"

You can read Woolfe's full article here. As you ponder what correct means to you, enjoy this video from CMC's last Underground/Opera: Orlando/Lunaire. If you don't think it was correct, bring it up with Ashiq :)


Orlando/Lunaire Distilled from Patrick Eakin Young on Vimeo.

Love Your Venue: Volcano @ The Gladstone

Volcano and The Gladstone have romanced a bit in the past...

Variete
In January 2004, Volcano in association with BMH Shift and The Art of Time Ensemble filled The Gladstone Hotel with the music of Argentinian/German composer Mauricio Kagel in a vaudeville performance featuring dance, acrobatics, contortion, burlesque, clowning, and poetry.

Wendy Akerboom, Erin Bouvy, Kathleen Le Roux
Photo by Kenneth Grey

Directed by Ross Manson, the production was hailed as a "landmark interdisciplinary collaboration" by The National Post. You can read a preview of the show from NOW Magazine here.

Bamako in Toronto
In a co-presentation with Ryerson Gallery and Research Centre, Luminato, Autograph ABP, and The Gladstone Hotel, Volcano presented an exhibition of a new generation of photographers capturing a contemporary Africa, which coincided with the world premiere of The Africa Trilogy.

The event took its name from Rencontres de Bamako, one of Africa's largest and most compelling photography exhibitions. Curated by Mark Sealy, Director of London's Autograph ABP Agency, Bamako in Toronto featured an exquisite sampling of images from photographers Zanele Muholi (South Africa), Uche Okpa-Iroha (Nigeria), and Saidou Dicko (Burkina Faso).

On a sad but related note, Zanele Muholi was in the news recently when year's worth of photography and equipment was stolen from her flat in Cape Town. Zanele's photography documents the lives of queer Africans, and there is little doubt that it was a targeted attack.

Zanele was the winner of the AitP Short Program award with her film Difficult Love. You can watch an interview of Zanele discussing the film, and the difficulties faced by Black lesbians in South Africa today on YouTube:

Side Note: The Great Toronto Opera Houses

In our last post we looked at how The Gladstone once hosted Vaudeville performers on their way out of town. On a related note, we thought we'd share this article from The Bulletin about Toronto's historic opera houses, which thrived in the downtown core until Vaudeville put them out of business.

The article starts in the early 1800s when most theatre in Toronto was played in taverns, the performances considered amateurish by international standards, and the scene in desperate need of modernization and infrastructure to be internationally competitive.

The Grand Opera House in Toronto
(from the Canadian Illustrated News)

The first major step forward was the opening of The Royal Lyceum in 1848 (which stood where the TD Centre is today), followed in 1873 by perhaps the most famous: the Grand Opera House at Adelaide and Yonge, a 1750 seat palace that hosted some of the world's greatest performers and some truly spectacular shows:

"Unlike today when going to the opera is going to the Opera with a capital-O, 150 years ago a night at the opera might also have included comics singing the popular songs of the day, musical interludes, poetry readings and novelty acts. It mixed together.... for an enjoyable night out that ended with a rousing chorus of Rule Britannia. The age of the Music Hall had arrived."

Sadly for the Grand, Toronto in the 1800s was prone to catching fire...read the full article here.

Side note to this side note:
The Grand Opera House was also home to one of the Canadian art world's greatest mysteries when its owner, theatre magnate Ambrose Small, went missing after depositing a cheque for $1 million in a nearby bank. The case caught the attention of mystery lovers around the world, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the very public investigation would reveal that Small kept a secret sex room at the Grand Opera House where he entertained his numerous mistresses. His Wikipedia page is definitely worth a read.

A great shot of Yonge and Adelaide
circa 1907 and 2010 from Toronto Before