National Arts Centre - Centre national des Arts Canada is our stage. Le Canada en scène.

Multitudes

Feist Toronto

Lead creator and performer Leslie Feist

In an unconventional production with limited capacity, Feist invites the audience to reclaim the stage with MULTITUDES, an intimate performance of new songs.

Conceived during, and in response to, a pandemic period when stages had to remain empty and communal joy was interrupted, MULTITUDES offers a joint and safe reclaiming of the stage. Featuring all new music written and performed by Feist, accompanied by Todd Dahlhoff and Amir Yaghmai, MULTITUDES is an intimate, radically communal and topsy-turvy production that muddies the roles between audience and performer, observer and its subject.

Entering into a cavernous room scattered with an inexplicable mess, the ephemera asks us if it’s a series of clues, a scavenger hunt or the rarified air of an auction. Disguising her performance as a near-traditional solo show, Feist sings from a central circle, like story time at the library. Within a cascade of archaic technologies and an earth-worship echoing paganism, MULTITUDES explore themes of communication, grave consequence and chosen optimism; empathy and individualism; death and the reluctance of maturing.

Through a macro lens as intimate as pillow talk, we consider the relationship between the subjective and the universal, the Rubik’s cube of any single individual’s life and our multifaceted relationships with each other.

Company

Widely recognized as one of the most compelling vocalists and songwriters in her genre, Leslie Feist is an 11-time Juno Award-winning solo artist and founding member of Polaris Music Prize-nominated band Broken Social Scene.

Following the breakout success of her sophomore album Let It Die (named Alternative Album of the Year at the 2004 Juno Awards), the Nova Scotia-born musician went on to achieve international acclaim with 2007’s The Reminder, a gold-certified release that landed on best-of-the-year lists from outlets like Pitchfork, NPR, Spin, and Rolling Stone, in addition to winning Feist the 2007 Shortlist Music Prize. Along with earning four Grammy Award nominations, The Reminder delivered one of the most indelible songs of the 2000s with “1234,” a Billboard Hot 100-charting single that paved the way for Feist’s appearance on such iconic shows as Saturday Night Live and Sesame Street.

Arriving in 2011, her fourth full-length Metals was hailed as the best album of the year by New York Times chief popular music critic Jon Pareles, and later won the 2012 Polaris Music Prize. In 2017 Feist released her most recent album Pleasure, a critically lauded work accompanied by a storytelling podcast series entitled Pleasure Studies.

Creative team

Lead creator and performer Leslie Feist
Scenic and lighting design Rob Sinclair
Musicians Amir Yaghmai and Todd Dahlhoff
Video content creation Colby Richardson

National Creation Fund investment

The National Creation Fund’s investment of $175,000 supported the completion of the project’s development, with additional time to finalize the technical, digital and sound elements, and to test and refine the production through preview performances for an invited audience.

Credits

Produced by TO Live and Kampnagel International Summer Festival, in association with the National Arts Centre’s National Creation Fund.

Commissioning partners: To Live, Kampnagel International Summer Festival, Festipielhaus St Pölten.

Performance dates

Past performances

Presented by International Summer Festival Kampnagel	Aug 4 - Aug 8, 2021	Kampnagel Halle K6 (Hamburg)
Presented by the National Arts Centre	Oct 14 - Oct 17, 2021	Southam Hall (Ottawa)
Presented by TO Live	Oct 20 - Oct 30, 2021	Meridian Hall (Toronto)
Presented by Buell Theatre	Apr 21 - Apr 22, 2022	Buell Theatre (Denver)
Presented by the Shrine Auditorium	Apr 26 - Apr 27, 2022	Shrine Auditorium (Los Angeles)
Presented by the Paramount Theatre	Apr 30 - May 1, 2022	Paramount Theatre (Seattle)
Presented by Stanford Live	May 5 - May 7, 2022	Memorial Auditorium (Stanford)
Presented by Zürcher Theatre Spektakel	Sep 2 2023	Theatre Spektakel (Zurich)