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by Danika Lorèn, Spencer Kryzanowski & Sarah Slean, directed by Jennifer Nichols

Against the Grain, Redwood Theatre, 1300 Gerrard Street East, Toronto

April 10–12, 2026

Faith: “Hello from children of planet Earth!” (The Close Encounters of Faith Friesen)

Canuck Cantatas is the first major showcase for Against the Grain since in-demand librettist Royce Vavrek became its Artistic Director. The show consists of the world premieres of three fascinating 20-minute compositions for solo voice accompanied by from three to five instruments. Given the abundant talent of all those involved, Canadian opera has a solid future.

The three works are, in order of presentation, The Close Encounters of Faith Friesen with music by Danika Lorèn to a libretto by Vern Thiessen, Red Daughters with music by Spencer Kryzanowski to a libretto by Emma Pennell and Kimberly Dunbar with music by Sarah Slean to a libretto by Vavrek himself. The pieces share several traits. All three feature isolated protagonists who overcome their isolation. All three are amplified and make use of pre-recorded electronic sounds. In all three the composer or librettist or both also performed the piece. And all three are directed by Jennifer Nichols.

Nichols has staged the works on an island constructed a few steps from the stage of the Redwood Theatre with the audience situated around three sides of the island. While the musicians remain on the stage, the solo singer is free to remain on the island or move between the island and the stage. Projections by Nathan Bruce play across a screen on the back wall of the stage, but only those in the audience facing the stage head on are able to see both the performer and the projections at the same time. Each cantata ends with a projection of the night sky, featuring the Pleiades, which, according to Nichols’s Director’s Note, symbolizes “the divine feminine”.

While the cantatas are for solo voice, Nichols employs three non-singing actors — Daniela Agostino, Mona Subramani and Gandharva Krishna — in all three pieces to set the scene or physically interact with the soloist. While they are not always present you could say that they serve the function of a silent chorus.

There is no credit for set or costume designer, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that the works were fully staged. A single feature dominates the island set in all three pieces, and that is a circular fire pit that represents a campfire outdoors in the first two works and a locus of destruction outdoors in the third. Nichols thus links all three with the image of contained fire as both a symbol of civilization and of its ruin.

The Close Encounters of Faith Friesen

The librettist for Faith Friesen is the widely acclaimed playwright Vern Thiessen, known for such varied works as Einstein’s Gift (2003), Vimy (2007), Of Human Bondage (2014) and Bluebirds (2022). The composer and performer is Danika Lorèn, who has won renown in both capacities throughout their career. Their most recent appearance in opera in Toronto was in Garden of Vanished Pleasures in 2024.

Thiessen’s story concerns the title character who keeps a lonely vigil at their remote radio station scanning the air waves every night for signs of life in outer space. Faith sings that they have been doing this for so long they have forgotten why they are doing it and makes the obvious pun that they have begun to lose their faith. The cantata ends with an unexpected epiphany in which Faith accepts their place in the world.

Of the three works presented, this is the one which offers more ideas than its 20 minutes can contain. We really would like to know how Faith’s strange situation began. We also would like some foreshadowing of Faith’s epiphany so that it feels more like a logical conclusion rather than a bolt from the blue.

Nevertheless, Lorèn has fashioned from Thiessen’s libretto into a fantastic showcase of their immense musical talent. They draw rich sonorities from a trio of violin, viola and bass clarinet. Over their euphonious rumblings Lorèn’s powerful, pure soprano soars in long vocal lines of almost Wagnerian length and difficulty. Whoever has designed the cantata has made Faith look like a frump, but Lorèn seems to revel in the notion that beneath Faith’s unremarkable exterior lies a questing soul of exquisite beauty.

Red Daughters

Royce Vavrek announced from the stage before Red Daughters began that the initially-announced composer Sonny-Ray Day Rider had withdrawn from the work on April 6, only five days before the piece was to be performed. Since librettist Emma Pennell still wished to sing their words, pianist Spencer Kryzanowski, amazingly, set Pennell’s libretto in only two days. The only give-aways of the haste of the work’s composition were that the music had not been orchestrated (if that was the ultimate intention) and that Pennell sometimes had to refer to a score on a music stand. Otherwise, the cantata is so confidently performed and staged, no one would ever know the unusual circumstances behind its creation.

Pennell’s libretto is a meditation on what is feels like to be an Indigenous person accustomed to nature whose success requires living in a city where everything is alien and threatening. Pennell’s central character is named “Emma Pennell” so it would seem clear that the piece has an autobiographic basis. Indeed, Pennell hails from the village of South River in rural Northern Ontario, and recognition of their talent brought them to perform in Toronto and Montreal.

The libretto first focusses on the pleasure of growing up among trees. Success brings Emma to the city where people are not friendly and look right through you. Worse, there are places that Emma has been told to avoid. The notion of cities as dangerous places immediately triggers in Emma’s mind the fate of so many Indigenous women. (As the 2019 Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls found, Indigenous women and girls make up less than 5% of the Canadian population but represent approximately 24% of all homicide victims.)

Thus, when Emma wanders back into the woods, trees are hung with red dresses, honouring the lives of all the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirited People. Emma feels solidarity with them, symbolized by their donning a red dress and embracing the three members of the silent chorus also clad in red.

Spencer Kryzanowski, who also provides the vibrant piano accompaniment, has sensitively set libretto in tonal, neo-romantic mode. Pennell’s commanding soprano underscores the meaning of their words with great expressivity. Hastily as it may have been composed, Red Daughters is a work that feels complete and could well serve Pennell as a signature piece.

Kimberly Dunbar

After the existential reflections of the first two cantatas, the evening closed with a comic piece composed and sung by singer-songwriter, musician, poet and actor Sarah Slean to a libretto by Vavrek. The libretto is divided into five sections, all of them presenting one-sided interactions by the title character whether we hear her side of a phone conversation, her video addressing her pet cause or her address to a gathered crowd. The wit of Vavrek’s libretto is that Kimberley’s words alone are enough to emphasize the hypocrisy and danger inherent in her views.

Her pet cause is the censoring of library books that she feels are utter trash because they dare to speak of sex in all its variations and because like The Handmaid’s Tale (mentioned by name), they picture a world where men unquestioningly rule over women as a dystopia.

Rather than the long vocal lines of the first two cantatas, the lines in Kimberly Dunbar are short and snappy. Slean’s music using the full five-member ensemble, is very much like Sondheim in a playful mood and the words like Sondheim without his obsessive rhyming.

Slean gives a thoroughly delightful performance making a prudish face at the moment she says on the phone that she is not a prude. Slean is a live to the irony in every one of Vavrek’s lines. The music is not as vocally demanding as that in the previous two cantatas, but it is punchy and precise and a fine showcase for Slean’s talents as a singer and actor. As Kimberley inaugurates a book-burning in the fire pit that previously was a symbol of warmth, Slean gives us a glint of how Kimberly, so concerned with mothers protecting their children is just a tiny bit fascist in thinking she should determine what everyone else reads. I can see this piece being taken up by opera schools lucky enough to be located in liberal-leaning areas.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Danika Lorèn as Faith in The Close Encounters of Faith Friesen; Emma Pennell as Emma in Red Daughters; Sarah Slean as Kimberly in Kimberly Dunbar. © 2026 Lauren Halasz.

For tickets visit: atgtheatre.com.