Julie Salverson and Juliet Palmer met at Tapestry’s Composer-Librettist Laboratory in August 2002. Around that time, Julie had begun work on the ‘highway of the atom’ with her Concordia University colleague, Peter C. Van Wyck. Their research would take them along the route of uranium ore that was mined on Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, refined in Ontario, tested in New Mexico, and used for the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945.

Many of the development workshops explored the creative team’s desire to incorporate red nose clown as a vehicle to confront the tragedy. Was it possible to blend opera “high art” with clown “low art?” Many clown specialists, including graduates of l’École Jacques LeCoq and Phillipe Gaulier, improvised with spoken text beside classically trained singers. We came to a decision: Shelter needed to be through-sung, with clown embraced in the articulation of the singing actors: have pleasure, complicité and contact, be available despite the humiliation of trying endlessly, stay in the trouble and “Amusez-vous, merde!” ("For God’s sake, joy!" - Phillipe Gaulier).

“I’ve always been attracted to catastrophic events. Joseph Campbell says ‘follow your bliss’, and while most people go after love or fulfillment, I’m drawn to tragedy and the fault lines in the psyche of a culture, the secrets that fester in families, leak quietly into communities and eventually – sometimes – explode. Such is the story of Shelter.”

- Julie Salverson, Librettist

"The Cold War hovered over my childhood, threatening imminent catastrophe and planetary doom. Growing up in New Zealand was no guarantee of safety — the governments of France, the U.K., and the U.S.A. all conducted nuclear tests in the Pacific Ocean. This was brought home in 1985 when I heard the explosive boom as the French government bombed the Greenpeace vessel The Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour. Skip ahead fifteen years and I became a citizen of Canada, a country with a strikingly different atomic history. The lights in my house are powered by nuclear power and my neighbourhood in Toronto hosts a uranium fuel pellet processing plant. At night I lie in bed listening to the haunting sound of train whistles and wonder if another shipment of uranium has arrived from the west. In some sense we all live along the Highway of the Atom and everywhere is downwind. Tripping over tailings and bogged down in radioactive mud, perhaps laughter and beauty will cause us to linger a moment and consider which path leads us out of this mess."

- Juliet Palmer

“The score's strong eclectic mix creates its own unique style... This is music that is never meant to perfectly congeal, and it is precisely that quality that captures the multiple dissonances found in the cultural eclecticism of the atomic age.”

- Stephen Bonfield, Calgary Herald, 2012

"[An] intriguing, darkly comic fable."

- Heidi Waleson, The Wall Street Journal, 2012

"We need new operatic works that take risks and tackle more contentious subjects. Shelter does both."

- Mark Morris, Edmonton Journal, 2012

“[Palmer is] a fluent and versatile stylist, equally at home in accessible tonal idioms as well as modal textures coloured with Messiaen-like harmonies and rhythms.”

- Owen Mortimer, Opera Now, UK, 2012

“Palmer's score... draws on lullaby, German lieder, rock and big-band influences, which provide a sense of period for the action and also trigger a subtle blend of emotions.”

- Jon Kaplan, NOW magazine, 2014