Creation is an act of gathering: ideas, people, places, a bit of magic. One of my ongoing preoccupations is how we trace the impacts of this gathering. I picture my fingers moving along imaginary lines, feeling microscopic and deep grooves that spread out like a web through the communities holding each creation.
At the Fund, we talk about how creation builds community. During a recent gathering of our National Advisory Committee, Ana Serrano, one of our brilliant members, suggested that it’s the exact opposite: community builds creation. Because I like to make things complicated, I wonder if it’s actually community builds creation builds community builds creation…well you can imagine the rest.
Recently, I’ve been tracing fresh grooves through our new initiative, Critical Friends. I’m excited to give you a little hint of our tender new experiment, in which I’ve become an accidental yet passionate matchmaker. How do you support artists in taking the biggest leaps of their careers? I think you do what you’d do for a friend: you show up and you have their backs. And so, Critical Friends was born, in which we connect the lead creative of each project we invest in with a game-changing international artist/cultural leader.
Ragnheiður Skúladóttir, director of Festspillene I Nord-Norge, first shared the phrase Critical Friend with me, and it perfectly named exactly what I’d been trying to develop (Ragnheiður is also one of our illustrious Critical Friends!). Our first Critical Friend, dramaturg Lou Cope, joined Out Innerspace in Montreal for a tech residency this fall and sparks flew. More Critical Friends will join our creative adventures over the coming season. Stay tuned for more learnings from this experiment in cross-continent friendship!
And do we ever have some great creative adventures lining up! Here are three – our most recent investments.
Letters to the Future
Miranda Mulholland & Neil Pearson
Letters to the Future is a gorgeously ambitious creation, led by JUNO-nominated singer, songwriter, and fiddler Miranda Mulholland and UK producer Neil Pearson. This piece is a passionate cry for the power of art to shape policy, public opinion, and our future, and offers a bold experiment in how community builds creation.
“We’re bringing together songwriters and thinkers from Canada and the UK for a week on Prince Edward Island to envision the future we want to live in. The songs written from this incubation week will be shaped for the stage with our illumination team and we will send our musical letters in performance into the future to inspire, challenge and delight. Jeanette Winterson writes ‘art does not imitate life, art anticipates life.’ We intend to do this.”
– Miranda Mulholland and Neil Pearson
Our investment of $125,000 will support Miranda and Neil in bringing together Canadian and UK-based songwriters and thinkers in Prince Edward Island to incubate the work, and will enhance the final development period in which the creative team will shape the materials into a performance.
PS: Miranda and Neil’s Critical Friend is dramaturg Lou Cope (UK), who will bring her wise questions and great wit to PEI in April.
La tragédie d'Atys
Ballet Opéra Pantomime
How do you create a performance that’s thoroughly contemporary, but composed entirely of elements from the past? This question – and the invitation to listen again – guides the creation of La Tragédie d’Atys, coproduced by Ballet Opéra Pantomime, Opéra de Montréal, Les Boréades de Montréal, and UBU compagnie de création, in association with the National Theatre School.
“La Tragédie d’Atys centres on the conflict between private and public life, with the sense of commitment and duty that this implies; and the discrepancy between deep-seated desires and the masks that are sometimes imposed by society, by the exercise of power.”
– Stéphanie Jasmin, Libretto adaptation, director and set designer
Our investment of $150,000 will support the fusion of Baroque and contemporary practices, enrich the expressiveness of the music and the set design by refining a video device that responds to the rhythms of the score, and offer more time with the choristers.
Autogynegamy
House of Barbara | Danse-Cité
Autogynegamy is a new creation from multidisciplinary artist Elle Barbara. This political and ceremonial performance takes place in a desacralized church, and proposes a bold return to self-love as Elle marries herself. Here, song, dance, music, theatre and digital technologies create friction between past and future, tradition and technology, magic and divine, living and inanimate.
Our investment of $170,000 will expand all aspects of the performance in order to offer an extraordinary experience, including additional performers, a hologram representing the spirit of Elle Barbara, and more.
PS: Elle’s Critical Friend is award-winning choreographer and director, Raja Feather Kelly (NYC). If our conversations together are any indication, this is a deep and unflinching pairing.
We’re thinking of you as the year closes. Thanks for reading about our adventures, and for taking a chance and embarking on your own. Thanks for however you contribute to creation and the ways you offer critical friendship. Can’t wait to see you in 2025.
