Director's Note:

Facing South is about the loss of our humanity. It is about how blind ambition can destroy not only the landscape of one's global neighbours, but also their society and home; about how it can devastate and separate the family and community of both colonizer and colonized. But Facing South is also about the return of humanity, in which uncovering our complicity in individual and historic deeds and showing where the responsibility lies in taking personal action, creates the possibility of forgiveness. Nature and the uncompromising power that it can exert – whether it chooses to take the life of a man stranded out on a polar ice cap, or end the misguided life of a man whose inner nature has been broken – forms the dramatic backdrop. Peary died on February 20, 1920, upon his ox skin rug.

This production of Facing South is part opera, part theatre. Wayne Strongman and I shared in a very collaborative process during the development of the themes and emotional journeys of the characters. It was our intent to carry this artistic collaboration through the day-to-day rehearsal process so that the invisible line between the conductor and director's terrain could remain fluid, generous and creative.

When I was at the beginning stages of envisioning the production of Facing South, the idea of 'Butoh' kept coming to mind – a meditation/ritual/dance/walk that was created by Tatsumi Hijikata, based on the horror that came out of Hiroshima. I felt it could be a striking metaphor for the long years of excruciating pain and struggle that Robert Peary, Mathew Henson and their Inuit guides underwent in their quest for the Pole. Butoh takes literally years of training, so our movement designer, Claudia Moore, came up with a very slow walk/meditation that she developed, painstakingly, with the performers. She also worked with the cast co-creatively to develop a vocabulary of movement, specific to each of the characters’ respective emotional journeys. It gives the production of Facing South a unique landscape of physicality.

Designers Dany Lyne and Pierre Lavoie also worked creatively as a team with me to help make the production of Facing South part opera/theatre and part art installation. Tapestry Opera suggested a site-specific venue for the opera and this gave us the dramatic license to design the entire space so that it maintains it’s original condition and, at the same time, embodies the visual ideas within the libretto and score. We also wanted the site to visibly transform, excite and make both political and personal statements, and for the set, costumes and lighting to interact with each other as well as with the site itself. We wanted it to be functional, theatrical and sculptural all at the same time and, most importantly, we wanted it to feel comfortable and creative for the cast of Facing South.

- Joanna McIntyre

Music Director's Note:

All the operatic touchstones are here – beautiful singing, an almost baroque sense of vocal production; a powerful and evocative text; a physical movement that employs the art of Butoh, to resonate deeply with how it feels to live in cold beyond our worst imaginings.

Here is the character of Robert Edwin Peary, whose assumptions – “I break nature” – take the superiority of humanity to its most boastful and most absurd self-deception. His hunger to dominate is powerful and overwhelming; the wake of his destruction pollutes a pristine landscape and destroys Inuit lives.

Josephine, his wife and accomplice, who supported him, travelled with him, bore his children and held his other children, born of Inuit women, is a buttress to his ambition. It is through her acknowledgement and clarity that we understand the roots of Peary’s greatest failure: in seeking to become the hero, he turned his back on humanity. Minik, the Inuit boy, seized from his own world and thrust into another, physically surviving where others could not, is unable, ultimately, to survive spiritually in either world.

And finally, Matthew Henson, as improbable as it seems, is an African-American who dedicated himself to Peary and his quest. Henson trained the dogs, broke the trail, learned the Inuit language, sired children, but his trust was betrayed by his mentor and leader at the pivotal moment.

- Wayne Strongman