#IndieFest celebrates innovation in opera, from virtual reality to diverse new voices
Re:Naissance Opera’s Debi Wong works to commission work and amplify a thriving new community
Mezzo-soprano singer, producer, and re:Naissance Opera artistic director Debi Wong is out to upend your notions of what “opera” is.
VR technology is just one of the forms #IndieFest taps in its presentations and workshops.
Re:Naissance Opera presents #IndieFest from October 28 to November 7
IF THE WORD “opera” makes you think of bewigged divas belting out classic arias on an opulent stage—well, #IndieFest is here to expand your horizons.
The wide-ranging live-and-online event October 28 to November 7 will feature everything from motion-capture avatars in a VR performance to a hackathon bringing high-tech programmers and artists together. Elsewhere, check out a short comedic operetta about two roommates debating the “whiteness” of opera.
“There’s this whole part of our classical music and opera sector that exists and thrives, and so many artists are doing amazing things,” enthuses Debi Wong, founder and artistic director of re:Naissance Opera, which is presenting the fest. “Opera is the process, not the product. Opera is the tool we use—a multidisciplinary art form that requires so many people coming together.”
It’s not that Wong is a stranger to the classical opera world. After the mezzo-soprano’s undergrad at UBC’s School of Music, she went on to study vocal and historically informed performance for her Masters at Yale, and has sung around Europe.
But she also started discovering a whole other world of opera beyond the concert stage. Among her own experimental projects, she’s spearheaded OrpheusVR, an interactive virtual-reality opera that featured at last year’s VIFF Immersed exhibit. Other projects in recent years include a reimagining of Handel’s Acis & Galatea as a tale of two 19th-century women punished for falling in love, and working as lead producer on the groundbreaking Jesse: An ASL Opera, which integrated sign language.
Along the way, Wong has also met opera innovators here and across the country—and aims to connect them and emerging artists at #IndieFest, an array of performances, workshops, and panels that grew out of the first Indie Opera West symposium she helped organize in 2018.
“A lot of people say ‘That’s not opera. That’s not the tradition,’” she says. “But there is great value in many different ideas existing in one space. And if our community is only focused on one thing, then what are we not opening our eyes to?”
When Wong founded re:Naissance in 2017, she didn’t just want to rethink how opera was made; she had an eye on who was making it. Inclusivity has been a huge part of her organization’s mandate, and it’s no surprise that #IndieFest 2021 is centred on new female, nonbinary, and BIPOC voices.
“Sometimes, when I’m in these spaces and meetings with different opera leaders across the country, I feel like I’m alone—I’m the only woman of colour,” she allows. “That’s different when I look at my colleagues that I’m working with here: these are people I’ve known and loved and admired in the community, and have looked to them time and time again for their leadership. Having them produce in #IndieFest is a way for me to lift up their leadership.
“It is women and nonbinary people that are pushing these innovations and new ways of creating,” she adds, “but we don’t look to them as much as we should. They get overshadowed by all the systemic things that lead to that. So every year I keep lifting them up.”
#IndieFest will tackle some of those issues in performances and discussions. A big part of the event is audience experiences. Renae Morriseau’s M’Girl brings song and Indigenous percussion to the Annex on the opening night, while A Wake of Vultures’ Nancy Tam leads Walking Alone at Night by Myself’s multimedia mix of soundscape, movement, and light pattern, live at the same venue the next evening. Elsewhere, #IndieFest has commissioned librettist-director Valerie Sing Turner’s comedic operetta and composer Katerina Gimon’s Did I Just Say That?—built around a debate between a white composer and her BIPOC roommate about feminism, racism in opera, and what it takes to get ahead.
A Wake of Vultures’ Walking Alone at Night By Myself.
“It’s a comedy that tackles conversations we have all the time as women of colour in the performing arts world, and especially in opera,” Wong says. “It really shines a light on these things: What it’s like to play characters that have so many gender and racial stereotypes embedded into the role, and then they just end up dead in the opera. What is it like to just have to perform those stories over and over again, and how do we create new stories?”
Shirin Eskandani
#IndieFest also strives to expand artists’ horizons and encourage them to express themselves in innovative ways. On November 4 via Zoom, former opera singer and current life coach Shirin Eskandani hosts a workshop in compassionate and resilient leadership, while, the same day online, Loose Tea Music Theatre and Opera Mariposa partner with Tapestry Opera to host conversations with disabled and chronically ill artists in the Canadian opera sector. Elsewhere, look for the Spirits of the Virtual Space, a VR workshop held by re:Naissance and The Cultch’s Ignite! Youth Program that’s free for artists under 24 (with headsets provided), or the Indie Opera Hackathon’s networking and pitch sessions happening online on November 4.
There is much more, bringing together a range of artists and groups—and nary a 19th-century wig in sight.
More importantly, for Wong, and for #IndieFest, this is just the start of showcasing, and commissioning the creation of, more opera that defies constraints and marginalization.
“Our connection points are, What are the unique barriers we’re facing artists who aren't in big organizations or in organizational structures? How can we problem-solve together and amplify each others work?” Wong says. “That’s why we partner with so many different groups.
“I want to shine a light on this part of the industry,” she emphasizes, “and I want to pay the artists to explore their ideas.”
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