IndieFest's searing new opera Angel's Bone draws on years of consultation with community
Delving into the heartbreaking issue of child and youth exploitation, the show is one of several that are rethinking the creative process
IndieFest and re:Naissance Opera founder Debi Wong. Photo by Dahlia Katz
Winona Myles and Alyssa Samson are two of Angel’s Bone’s young stars.
IndieFest runs November 16 to 27, with Angel’s Bone at the Annex from November 25 to 27 at the Annex, in a coproduction by re:Naissance Opera, Sound the Alarm: Music/Theatre, Turning Point Ensemble, Loose Tea Music Theatre, and Arraymusic
A DISTURBING PARABLE about two young angels who fall to earth, only to be exploited by adults, Du Yun’s Angel’s Bone takes on subject matter you wouldn’t traditionally associate with opera.
But its Canadian premiere here exemplifies the way IndieFest not only pushes operatic forms onstage, but rebuilds the structures around the creative process.
Starting November 16, re:Naissance Opera’s IndieFest will play host to everything from XR operas to unique concert series curated by BIPOC talents. But it’s the landmark staging of Angel’s Bone that may best illustrate the collaboration and inclusivity that drive the three-year-old festival’s vision.
Aside from its unsettling and urgently contemporary subject matter of child trafficing, as told through Royce Vavrek’s libretto, the work is brought to life with projections, and boldly mixes unexpected musical genres like Renaissance polyphony, punk, and cabaret.
Behind the scenes, this Angel’s Bone production is just as nontraditional. The coproduction brings together re:Naissance Opera, Sound the Alarm: Music/Theatre, Turning Point Ensemble, Loose Tea Music Theatre, and Arraymusic, with plans to open it in Toronto in spring 2024. And the years-long creative process has been guided by a “social-context committee” of social workers and artists, many of whom have frontline experience supporting exploited youth.
“It’s a great example of how we’re approaching everything a little differently and how important collaboration is—being innovative about how we produce and operate in this world,” says Debi Wong, founder of re:Naissance Opera and IndieFest. “Having many different companies and leaders working on this means we have access to new ideas and new perspectives and new funding sources, which allows us to be able to produce bigger work. Because none of our producing partners would be able to produce Angel’s Bone on their own.
“On top of that, it has this social justice aspect that allows us this practice space to learn about coexisting with people who have different lived experiences and perspectives than us,” she adds.
Trained as an opera singer, Wong has dreamed of bringing Angel’s Bone here ever since she performed in a workshop version of it as it was being developed—an experience that shifted her entire view of what opera could achieve, and led her to found re:Naissance Opera as a new way forward in the artform. Angel’s Bone would go on to make Yun the first female Asian composer to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music, in 2017.
Wong strove to produce the opera here in as collective a way as possible, establishing the advisory committee—Wong refers to it as her “group dramaturg”—headed by her friend Brenda Lochhead, a victim support worker and advocate who works for Family Services of Greater Vancouver and who is an embedded support worker in Vancouver Police Department’s Counter Exploitation Unit. The social context committee includes youth workers, survivors, lawyers, human rights activists, sex workers, and opera artists.
Together they have guided several key changes to the production. The biggest, Wong says, is to the character of Mrs. XE (Alyssa Samson), one half of the married couple who takes the angels into their home, only to clip their wings and exploit them for money. (Asitha Tennekoon plays the boy angel, and Winona Myles and Eliza Bagg alternate the role of the girl angel.)
“We had our social context committee look at the libretto, and they brought up gender stereotypes that could be detrimental to the way we talk about sexual exploitation,” Wong explains. “If you just read the libretto as is, you might get the impression that Mrs. XE is someone just bored at home who just wants more money, and so she and her partner go into trafficking. But talking to the committee, we learned that yes, this is a character that could exist, that there could be female-identifying people that are trafficking and aiding in exploitation—but that is the result of ongoing trauma and these people are almost always victims of trafficking themselves. This is often a way for them to get out of a certain situation. So through this very different worldview, we’re able to see how this might happen.
“This isn't a likable character,” she stresses. “We're not asking people to feel sorry for the character. But we’re allowing people to see how this might happen and in doing so see the way all the different systems work together to perpetuate this kind of thing in our communities.”
Each Angel’s Bone performance will be preceded by 30-minute pre-show chats that tackle such issues as the root causes of human trafficking (think systemic racism and the sexualization of youth), and the lasting effects of exploitation. The entire experience is a call to action—as well as a tribute to the resilience of those who survive the trauma.
Examining the role of artists in the community was one of the cornerstones of IndieFest when Wong launched it, just as the pandemic was descending, three years ago. (Its last two iterations have had to rely heavily on online content.)
“I learned classical music through a lens of having to be excellent all the time, and excellence meant technical perfection,” reflects the mezzo-soprano, who studied at UBC, Yale. and the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. “But my experience in the community is actually being someone who is able to bring people together to create these spaces where people can come out of their silos and communicate and be with each other.”
IndieFest will connect many other disparate worlds and far-flung disciplines over the course of the event November 16 to 27.
Amid the offerings is the first in-person performance of Live from the Underworld II: Eurydice’s Calling, an operatic XR experience with computer-generated sets and mythological avatars brought to life by the remarkable collaboration of opera, dance, hip-hop and video game professionals. (Ballet BC alumni Alexis Fletcher and Justin Rappaport bring the characters of Eurydice and Orpheus to life through avatars.) It shares a double bill on opening night at the Annex with a sneak peek at the new opera-in-development Inferno: bringing together hip-hop, opera, and the theatre world, it’s a feminist, anti-colonial spin on Dante’s Inferno by IndieFest 2022 resident artists Omari Newton and Amy Lee Lavoie.
Elsewhere, an Imaginarium series invites a diverse foursome of BIPOC and LGBTQ2SIA+ leaders to curate concert events; see more on the program here.
“We want to create these unique spaces where people can be together and share art,” says Wong, who’s thrilled to finally be able to see IndieFest in full live format for the first time. “Whose voices have been overshadowed by tradition, and whose voices can we lift up in our community?”
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