culture
Get Your Booster Shots of Culture
Tapestry Opera's artistic director Michael Mori talks about marrying opera with food in the Distillery District.
Tapestry’s artistic director Michael Mori in the location of this year’s Tapestry Briefs, the Distillery District. Photo courtesy of Tapestry Opera.
Tapestry Briefs: Booster Shots
Ernest Balmer Studio (9 Trinity Street)
November 13–16, 8 p.m.
$35
Crawling is an activity normally reserved for infants or university students going pub to pub on reading week—but thanks to local company Tapestry Opera, a whole new kind of crawler is set to take over Toronto’s historic Distillery District.
With Booster Shots, this year’s instalment of their annual Tapestry Briefs program, the company will premiere short operatic works by Toronto composers and playwrights, set in various locations around the neighbourhood—from Balzac’s café to an old elevator shaft. The bite-sized operas will be accompanied by thematically appropriate food and drink offerings, including ice cream and sake.
This year’s roster of playwrights includes some well-known names: Nicolas Billon, Hannah Moscovitch, Morris Panych, David Yee, and Donna-Michell St. Bernard. Composers include Ivan Barbotin, Dean Burry, James Rolfe and Nicole Lizee, Benton Roark, and Chris Thornborrow.
Artistic director Michael Mori is the mastermind behind the this year’s Tapestry Briefs; Torontoist sat down with him to discover what opera has in common with HBO, and how beer can help make the art form more accessible.
Torontoist: Why were opera shorts and food a match for you?
The Booster Shots idea has a couple of sides. One is that you’re getting an intense shot of culture. They’re kind of like mini-pilots. If they really hit home, we’ll say ‘Yeah, let’s commission this to grow into a full-blown opera.’ Or some kind of a bigger work. Or, we can say ‘That’s the team we want to work with.’ They’ll have their own life as a short, but some have gone on to be performed all across the world which is kind of weird and cool. But for us, we’re definitely looking to develop a more mature repertoire. And this is the seeding ground for that.
Your office is here in the Distillery District, and you spend a lot of time here—how did this space contribute to idea of Booster Shots?
No more than two or three happen in a row [before moving to the next spot], so we really get to explore. Sometimes if I walk by an alley, I’ll think ‘I bet that has really great acoustics, I should do something in there.’ That’s just how my brain works. So that has happened a few times in the Distillery.
Actually two of the scenes will be in here [Balzac’s]—one on the balcony, one framed in the windows. One takes place in a cafe, it’s about a hipster couple that met on an internet dating site and come to some sort of hip cafe where they discover they don’t really know how to talk to each other because they’ve mostly been communicating online. So just as they’re about to leave they discover they share a passion for internet memes. It’s a bit more of a sketch. Sometimes the playwrights and composers play around with something that isn’t really appropriate for anything longer, but you get a sense of the humour of the artist. This would be more like the SNL of opera rather than the HBO. To me, opera has always lived in this larger-than-life world, and that can go both ways―it can either be a cracking open of the soul or completely absurdist.
And what about the food and drink in the neighbourhood?
Have you ever been to the Ontario Spring Water Sake Company? It’s incredibly well done. They match the acidity of the water to the best region in Japan but from a spring just outside of Toronto. And I think the product is amazing, and people don’t know about it. And there’s something analogous to Tapestry―we’re slightly below the radar compared to the quality of the work and the quality of the artists we work with. The reason why I think the HBO comparison is apt is because our writers are at that level. Four of the five writers this year have been nominated for Governor General’s Awards or won them. That’s a bit ridiculous.
What does it mean for the program to have such a roster?
I feel like a lot of the stuff that’s being commissioned by the big companies tends to sound like opera that’s been done before. And so, it doesn’t really succeed anymore in connecting to our generation. It might be in English, but I find that’s a faulty argument in how to connect to a generation. It has to be original, coming from people who have their fingers on the pulse of what’s happening.
Is that what sets Tapestry apart from other opera companies?
I think every other opera company is doing a great job of talking to not this generation. It was the generation that grew up with the record, and their kids. And first generation and second generation Europeans represented the bulk of who supported the opera, and that generation has been supplanted by a different set of immigrants and different technologies. So if we were to try to translate that into the present, that’s kind of what we’re going for. Why not embrace world that we have, the diversity that we have, and the music that we have with sophistication and complexity and beauty, and the kind of depth you need for something epic. But not recreating a post-European technique.
How do you do that in five minutes?
There’s only one way to find out―you should come! No, I think it starts with the playwrights. They capture the sense of what it is to be in Toronto today, from their point of view or even from history’s point of view. Hannah Moscovitch is writing about the 1860s … she’s celebrating a female gang leader. So that’s something that wouldn’t be possible in the old model of doing things. I think there’s something that’s emerging with an openness in discourse, which we’ve seen especially in the last couple of weeks for a different reason, and it speaks well of Canada and our place right now in giving a really healthy voice to the perspective of history and the present that’s not just old, male, white-based points of view. And that’s good for everyone, and art has always played a big part in social change, and, believe it or not, this is happening now. This is a medium where we can talk about it.
What is it about opera that sparks those conversations?
Music has an ability to make you forget everything and just feel, and I believe that we’re educated and open enough for slightly more complex music than we’re faced with on a daily basis. But it’s really finding a recipe for what is going to hit home. We’re working with some of the best singers in the city, but of the best singers in the country, the best actors. Which is a standard that’s not expected in opera schools. So they’ve risen to the top of their fields because of their ability to act as well. And that’s important. A lot of people aren’t interested in opera because they don’t buy it. It’s already such a stylized genre; it has to be convincing. In opera, we call it ‘park and bark’ when singers with a big voice just stand there doing nothing while their lover is standing off slightly behind them.
So adding an element of food or flavour is a creative way of demonstrating opera’s contemporary relevance?
The average educated person has their top five foodie places, but maybe can’t name a composer or a poet. I don’t think that says we’re stupid; I just think it means artists and producers have to work at bridging that disconnect. That’s what I’m interested in, at least. I don’t want to be the niche of a niche … If people are digesting culture in a certain way already, I think accepting some of those things and offering something substantial in return is a fair way to present something that might feel intimidating.