This fifth installment of the Tapestry Explorations (TAP:EX) series offers a take on a Silicon Valley product launch, where audiences are the first to learn about Elysium, a new cloud-based technology that reimagines the afterlife as a perfect curation of our best memories. This fictional product draws attention to the modern world developing ne...

Une danseuse aveugle et l’ombre de sa vue perdue partagent une dernière danse.

Avertissement de contenu : maladie, mort, colonisation

Facing South is inspired by the life story of American Arctic explorer, Rear Admiral Robert Edwin Peary, and his contested discovery of the North Pole in 1909. The opera takes place in the inner landscape of Peary’s mind during the last hours of his life in February 1920, as he lies dying of pernic...

La scène se déroule lors d'une compétition nationale de patinage artistique. L'entraîneure se trouve aux côtés de la patinoire et réagit à la performance donnée par sa protégée.

The orchestra prelude details a sweeping skate dance routine that ends badly for the skater (she falls, tries to regain momentum, but falls again). The skater limps onto the stage (in her guard-cov...

Avertissement de contenu : racisme, colonialisme, violence, mort

En Chine dans les années 1880, Lai Gwan, une jeune femme appauvrie, est à l'aube d'un énorme changement. Sa mère mourante la presse de respecter et d'honorer la mémoire de son père, Manli, dont la disparition au Nouveau Monde les hante tous les deux.

Armed with the hope that she will find her father aliv...

Avertissement de contenu : maladie en phase terminale

This is not a biographical opera, it is an exploration of an emotional journey. At age 5, Jacqueline has instant chemistry and sparks fly when she meets her cello. Their relationship grows stronger and closer, and Jacqueline matures into a charismatic and likeable teen, powerful on major stages. Soon she is a...

Avertissement de contenu : mort, meurtre, suicide, xénophobie

Jason, an army captain and now war-hero, is returning home after years of war and an uncertain future. His interpreter and lover M’dea and their son Chase accompany him to a new life in the West. Jason begins a political career, working alongside the President and Dahlia, the President’s bea...

Punk and operatic virtuosity collide in Tapestry’s third installment of the Tapestry Explorations (TAP:EX) series. Metallurgy is a collaboration between Jonah Falco and Mike Haliechuk of F*cked Up, the Polaris Prize-winning punk provocateurs, and two of Canada’s most masterful and versatile opera singers, mezzo-soprano Krisztina Szabó and tenor ...

Avertissement de contenu : meurtre, violence, maladie mentale

The story begins with a distressed Paul being interviewed about his missing parents. It switches to two weeks earlier with Harold and Julia in the airport after sending him off. Julia worries that something is wrong with their son. Harold is sure that he'll be back to his old self after the tr...

A ‘Hitchcock-style thriller’ for baritone and soprano, Nigredo Hotel is “the story of a neurosurgeon, a man of science, who has lost his soul. One night he thinks he has hit a child on the road and hides out in a decrepit, Hitchcockian motel run by a monstrous concierge called Sophie. The terrifying crone — his anima — locks him into his room an...

Avertissement de contenu: captivité, perte de mémoire

Laura est enfermée de force dans un sous-sol pendant des années ; elle se libère et s'approche d'un étranger dans la rue. Elle se demande si l'étranger se souvient d'elle et découvre qu'elle se souvient à peine d'elle-même.

Avertissement de contenu : meurtre, mort, cadavre

Le compositeur Gareth Williams et le librettiste David James Brock ont créé un opéra-promenade in situ inspiré du plus ancien pub de Glasgow, Sloans. Le public se déplace dans ce pub vieux de 250 ans et découvre une série de scènes racontant des histoires d’amour, de perte, de vengeance et de pardon.

Avertissement de contenu: mort, travail du sexe

After the tragic death of her first child, a baby daughter, Isabelle has run away to another town in Spain to escape the grief, leaving her husband Hector with a double loss. They are a working-class couple. The scene opens with Isabelle expecting a client in a seedy bordello. Hector has found her. He entreats...

An opera for all ages. Sydney, an Asian elephant poached at a young age from the jungles of Indonesia, recalls her remarkable life in captivity, far from home, as her keeper of 22 years leads her on a journey towards sanctuary in the hills of Tennessee. A dynamic weaving of opera and dance unearths friendships lost and found and restores a stole...

Avertissement de contenu: violence coloniale, colonialisme, mort, maladie

1828, baie Notre Dame, sur la côte nord-est de Terre-Neuve. William Cormack, explorateur et anthropologue, a récemment créé le Beothuk Institute : un organisme destiné à prévenir l'extinction des premiers habitants de l'île. Après avoir appris qu'un Béothuk...

Avertissement de contenu : feu, mort

Janna and her grandpa are in Toronto’s distillery district. Before she has to leave, Janna asks him to tell the story of how he and Grandma met. Both were fighting a fire, and met as part of the bucket brigade. Janna proudly reminds him he saved everyone that night, but this isn’t true. Grandpa confesses that a wo...

Agnieska et Sumana partagent une soirée ensemble après s'être rencontrées dans un bar. La nuit, aussi intime soit-elle, a des significations très différentes pour chaque femme. Tandis que Sumana déborde de l'excitation d'une première chance amoureuse, Agnieska est hantée par les souvenirs de son passé amoureux.

The next morning, Agnieska wakes early and admires her new lover Sumana as sh...

Une sœur et un frère fouillent dans les affaires de leur mère récemment décédée et trouvent une vieille boule à neige de leur jeunesse. Tous deux veulent absolument la garder. Une dispute amère s’ensuit et la sœur laisse échapper par inadvertance un secret très douloureux.

Avertissement de contenu : antisémitisme, génocide, Holocauste, infanticide, meurtre, nazis, violence sexuelle, travail du sexe, violence, guerre

Still the Night tells the fictional story of two Jewish Polish cousins, both named Bryna, who have escaped from the Nazis and joined the Partisans. Along the way they are hung on crosses, raped, almost shot and forced to tu...

Tard dans la nuit, Allie se fait hanter par sa meilleure amie décédée, Karen.

Avertissement de contenu: abus sexuel d'un enfant, inceste, meutre, mort

Judith et Daniel, frère et sœur séparés depuis longtemps, sont réunis par le décès de leur père. Après tout ce temps passé, il semblerait que Judith n’ait pas changé du tout. Daniel tue sa sœur alors qu'elle veut reprendre leur relation sexuelle d'enfance.

La scène est divisée en deux parties : une dispute tendue entre une mère et son enfant et un aria tendre pour la mère alors qu'elle révèle enfin à son fils une réalité douloureuse quant à l'absence prolongée de son père.

Un fermier prend affectueusement soin de sa vache brune, sans savoir que lui et la vache se sont déjà rencontrés dans des vies antérieures, une fois au XVIIIe siècle et une autre fois au XXe.

Avertissement de contenu : mort, meurtre, violence

This opera explores the interior realm of a woman’s response to a crisis. The Laurels plays with audience assumptions and expectations; it is well into the piece before we realize the stranger is not the person he appears to be. While it is important that Laurel’s understanding of the Stranger is consi...

Avertissment de contenu: mort, emprisonnement, interrogatoire, suicide, torture

A translator at a secret prison for suspected terrorists witnesses extreme torture and death of detainees. She leaks the information to news broadcasters, but the government covers it up as a hoax. Her supervisor begs her to say nothing more about the things she has seen -...

Based on "The Handless Maiden," a mythic story found in cultures around the world, and a continuation of the events in Me and You (Madonna of the Wilderness).

After seven years of wandering, the girl (now known as Madonna) has regained her hands through loving self-sacrifice. She’s returned to the cabin of her childhood, where her journey beg...

Chloe et Eddie sont au lit lorsqu'ils sont interrompus par Matt, l'ex-mari de Chloe, un athlète. Matt demande où se trouve leur fille Ava, et reproche à Chloe d'avoir abandonné Ava pour un homme anonyme.

Un homme d'affaires attend un tramway, le dos tourné à une femme sans abri. Les deux hommes se jugent en silence. L'homme est agacé de voir quelqu'un qui veut quelque chose pour rien et la femme se sent jugée pour une situation sur laquelle elle n'a aucun contrôle. Les deux se reconnaissent enfin, et nous découvrons leur expérience commune.

Content warning: contains depictions of gun violence, mentions of homophobia, transphobia, self-harm, attempted suicide, memory loss, illness, death, and violence

Julie d'Aubigny (1673-1707), more often known by her stage name "Mademoiselle Maupin," was a queer and gender non-conforming opera singer. She was a mezzo-soprano, and sang some of ...

Avertissement de contenu : décès, suicide

Dragon’s Tale is the story of a young Chinese-Canadian woman (Xiao Lian) and her ailing father, both living in Toronto. Xiao Lian wakes up in the ancient past and witnesses the last days of one of China’s greatest poets, Qu Yuan. In doing so, she begins to understand her father and herself as she returns to a c...

Avertissement de contenu : erreur de genre, mentions d'agression sexuelle et de violence implicite

Chrysaor and Pegasus, children of the gorgon Medusa, have been living with their aunts Euryale and Stheno. They receive a message from their dead mother telling the story of her assault and murder by their father Poseidon. Rejecting his mother’s family, Chrysaor g...

On a fateful school trip to the ruins of Pompeii, the fantasies of smitten teenagers Suzie and Cass are ignited. They are transported from 1977 to 79 AD, where they discover romantic freedom in the looming shadow of Mount Vesuvius – but not for long. The timeline shifts to 1981 and the Fly by Night, a Toronto lesbian bar, in the aftermath of the...

Content warning: PTSD, violence, war

I Have No Stories to Tell You mines the aftereffects of war through the story of a soldier’s return home from an extended assignment on the battlefield. Written as a companion piece to Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, the opera explores war as a catalyst for changed identity through th...

Content warning: child neglect, death, migration, strong language, trauma, war

When Sophia’s mother dies, Sophia confronts half-forgotten traumas from her childhood. Sophia and her sister Emma grew up in a war torn country. The two young girls cope with and escape their grim circumstances – the adult world of war, death and displacement – thr...

We open on an Alzheimer’s hallucination. Martha, a woman in her seventies, sees a surreal and exaggerated world in which strangers torment her and weather invades her kitchen. Martha remains in the grips of her hallucination until the presence of Martha’s daughter, Winnie, rips her out of it. Suddenly, shockingly, Martha is back in the Alzheimer...

As a teenager in the 1920s, my grandmother Gladys played piano for silent films in the remote New Zealand town of Takaka. She still recalls a film which was shot nearby at Pohara beach. Although Glad has never seen the film, I found out later that it was the underwater spectacular Venus of the South Seas, starring Australian diver Annette Keller...

Anna and Michael are successful young filmmakers from Alberta, married in life and in art. Their latest project is a movie about Martin Frobisher, Elizabethan pirate and explorer who made three perilous journeys to the Arctic in the 1570s.  History says that Frobisher failed in his attempt to find the fabled Northwest Passage, a quick route thro...