Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✩✩
written by Spy Dénommé-Welch & Catherine Magowan, directed by Maria Lamont
Native Earth Performing Arts, Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto
April 9-24, 2010
Giiwedin is a hugely imaginative and ambitious first opera by co-composers Spy Dénommé-Welch and Catherine Magowan. It basically tries to present a portrait of pre-contact Aboriginal life and a survey of French and British treatment of First Nations people from about 1750 to 1950. It’s rather too much to attempt in only two hours and means that the singers primarily function as symbols rather than characters. Yet, the music created by the co-composers for a four-piece baroque ensemble is so witty, so endlessly inventive and so well performed, the show is worth seeing for its sake alone.
We first meet the central figure Noodin-Kwe (Marion Newman) in 1950 as she lies on a gurney in an unnamed institution. What the sadistic, racist doctor (Lawrence Cotton) intends is unclear unless we refer to the programme to discover he plans to deliver her of a baby by C-section. Near the end of the opera we find he also plans to lobotomize her. This would have been more usefully mentioned at the start to give greater urgency to Noodin-Kwe’s desire to pass on her history to her new son. In her, seven generations of native experience have been symbolically combined in one person so that she can recount a life in Timiskaming before contact, when she was conversant with wolves and bears, to her first meeting a French explorer (Jesse Clark) to killing a British Minister (James McLennan) appropriating land for the railroad.
Dénommé-Welch’s trilingual libretto crams too much action into the two hours that there is little time for reflection of the kind that would lead to extended arias. One would like to hear more from Noodin-Kwe, the animals and the personified Forest about the impact of the white man’s actions, since what the co-composers have written is often so beautiful. Their music references everything from 16th- and 17th-century European music for church and theatre to Aboriginal song to 20th-century dance and radio jingles. We long for more access to the thoughts of Noodin-Kwe since we long to feels more what she feels. Newman’s rich, powerful voice is ideal for Noodin-Kwe, so much so that we would like longer arias simply to showcase it. Clark comes closest to creating a rounded character with his Inspector Clouseau-like explorer. Nicole Joy-Fraser is moving as Mahigan, the most playful of the timber wolves, who in a chilling scene must ready herself to join the spirit world. All in all, Giiwedin announces the arrival on the music scene of a team bursting with talent and imagination. I can’t wait to see what they will create next.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-04-12.
Photo: Marion Newman.
2010-04-12
Giiwedin