The Lake / nx̌aʔx̌aʔitkʷ marks a meeting of minds, cultures, and opera music, at DOXA
Film traces soprano Heather Pawsey’s long journey to decolonize a work about an Okanagan homesteader
Heather Pawsey and Delphine Derickson by Okanagan Lake in director John Bolton’s opera-meets-documentary, The Lake / nx̌aʔx̌aʔitkʷ.
DOXA presents The Lake / nx̌aʔx̌aʔitkʷ on May 6 ay 7:45 pm at VIFF Centre, and May 12 at 7:45 pm at SFU Woodward’s, as well as online throughout the festival
CALL IT FATE, call it coincidence, or call it an alignment of the stars: several unique events have drawn Vancouver opera soprano Heather Pawsey further and further into a journey with Barbara Pentland and poet Dorothy Livesay’s long-lost 1952 opera The Lake. And it all started from the first time she discovered the handwritten score at the Canadian Music Centre back in 1995.
A lover of Canadian music and literature, the rising talent had been in search of a homegrown aria to sing at the Eckhardt-Gramatte National Music Competition.
“It does feel like it came to me,” Pawsey reflects in an interview before the debut of the film that traces her work toward a decolonized production of the opera, The Lake / nx̌aʔx̌aʔitkʷ, at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival. “And when I opened the score for The Lake it really was one of those strange moments where I looked at the page and it not only felt like it would be the song I would sing, but also I just had this feeling that I couldn't explain, that I was going to have a really long history with the opera.”
The Vancouver Opera chorus member and founding artistic director of Astrolabe Musik Theatre adds with a laugh: “I mean I don't think I quite thought in 1995 that in 2022 that I would still be involved with this opera, and have done live performances in concert and then live performances, then the whole collaboration with Westbank First Nations, then making this feature film. I couldn't have seen that, but it did kind of feel like the universe had handed it to me.”
The rare opera to have been written by a female composer and librettist tells the story of Susan Allison, the first white woman to settle west of Okanagan Lake as the young bride of rancher John Allison. It traces their bonds with the local Westbank First Nations people—not to mention a sacred creature in the lake ( ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ in the Syilx language, better known to settlers as Ogopogo).
Soon after she took home the top Eckhardt-Gramatte prize, Pawsey took a trip to Quails’ Gate Estate Winery Pawsey where she had another moment of what she calls “synchronicity”. She discovered a log cabin on the site was Allison’s actual old homestead—the original “Sunnyside Ranch”. From then on she dreamed of staging the opera at the spot.
A key development happened at the first concert of The Lake in Vancouver in 2012, to mark the 100th anniversary of Pentland’s birth. Pawsey sang the part of Allison, and Turning Point Ensemble performed the modernist score. Delphine Derickson, a linguist, singer, and keeper of the Westbank First Nations cultural tradition, was in the audience. And when she connected with Pawsey backstage after the show, Derickson offered insights—launching a lasting friendship and a groundbreaking collaboration. Derickson would go on to help Pawsey incorporate Syilx/Okanagan perspectives and music into The Lake.
“She and I had an immediate connection,” Pawsey recalls. “It came about because of this meeting of two cultures and saying, ‘We want to work together.’ In 2012 we had a meeting of hearts and minds—and none of us knew how this was going to work. There were no textbooks, there were no maps.
“Once I got to know her, it became a lot of fun and we became able to play,” adds Pawsey, whose early rehearsals with Derickson appear in the film. “We got to a space where you drop all your fears and preconceptions and everybody just reaches a zone where you start to play.”
The world premiere of the opera integrating the Indigenous elements, and music incorporated into a new composition by Leslie Uyeda, was held at Quail’s Gate in the summer of 2014.
A lot of the new film is shot at the Sunnyside cabin and on the grassy shores of the lake as well. The Lake / nx̌aʔx̌aʔitkʷ marks the first time a Canadian opera has ever been shot specifically as a film, with local director John Bolton at the helm. The movie captures the Indigenous and non-Indigenous storytelling, music making, and dancing from the original production, interweaving chronological scenes from the entire one-act opera with interviews and the story of Pawsey and Derickson’s journey.
Pawsey now feels a deep connection to the pioneering Allison character she sings.
Heather Pawsey, dancer Corrine Derickson, and Delphine Derickson.
“I feel a responsibility because I am playing a real woman and I have her memoirs and writing,” Pawsey relates. “I met three of Susan Allison’s grandchildren, one of whom came while we were shooting. And then to be in her real cabin and looking over the lake where she said she saw ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ...” In another striking coincidence, Pawsey shares that she has the same birthday as Allison—August 18, “and we both landed in BC on our birthdays,” adds Pawsey, who hails from Saskatchewan.
The film features Corinne Derickson, Jordan Coble, and Krystal Withakay of Westbank First Nation; Glenn Deneault of the Shuswap/secwépemc Nation; BC composer Uyeda; Turning Point Ensemble’s Owen Underhill and Jeremy Berkman; and Vancouver-based opera singers Angus Bell, Kwangmin Brian Lee and Barbara Towell, who perform with Pawsey.
Long a champion of new music, especially Canadian new music, Pawsey is now inspired by the way that film can make contemporary opera accessible to viewers. “It got my production-singer brain quite excited about presenting contemporary music, while still keeping the integrity of the work,” she says.
Today Pawsey also brings the Indigenous knowledge that she learned working with Derickson to every piece of opera she does.
In one of the film’s more moving moments, the charismatic Derickson links music to the whooshing of the wind and the rhythms of a flowing creek: “Everything has harmony, everything has sound, everything has song.”
Insights from that worldview have shifted the approach of the busy Pawsey, who happens to be appearing in Vancouver Opera’s HMS Pinafore while The Lake / nx̌aʔx̌aʔitkʷ screens this week at DOXA. And she senses that the journey that started with that handwritten score in the CMC archives is long from over.
“I was with Delphine, and we said, ‘Why do we feel like this is only the beginning?’” Pawsey says with a laugh. “I don't know if this is the end of the this opera or not. What I do know is that how I look at all Western music has changed. I learned so much from my colleagues in the Westbank First Nation.
“It’s changed my life and certainly changed the way I feel just generally about everything, to have this wisdom that has been shared so generously to me,” she says, growing emotional. “It's a responsibility that I have to take forward.”
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