Two new vocal music film projects will screen in Toronto on June 15 as a collaboration between the Canadian Art Song Project and the Bicycle Opera Project. SWEAT, an opera film, and The Wild Goose, a musical animated short, will screen at the Revue Cinema in the city’s west end.
Following the Toronto screening, SWEAT will be available to stream online from June 16 to 30.
The Films in Brief
SWEAT
SWEAT was filmed in Hamilton and Kingston during the summer of 2022 by Bicycle Opera. Larissa Koniuk is co-founder of The Bicycle Opera Project, a team of two (with Nadia Chana) who literally toured from town to town with costumes and props via bicycle for six seasons before branching into digital and collaborative projects.
The summer of 2022 was a challenging time, with a lot of uncertainty about reopenings in the wake of the pandemic. Private and public supporters provided the funds for the film, which combines contemporary opera, dance, and artistic cinematography to tell the story of women working in a garment sweat shop in the early 20th century.
Choreographer Jennifer Nichols directed, choreographed and produced SWEAT to an original opera composed by Juliet Palmer, with a libretto by Anna Chatterton. As a choreographer, Jennifer has worked in film and television, including as head choreographer and dance consultant for the Netflix series Tiny Pretty Things.
The film has already won the Best Narrative Feature at the LA Independent Women Film Awards.
The Wild Goose
As part of its mandate, the Canadian Art Song Project looks for ways to present the art form to broader audiences through visual media. The Wild Goose was recently completed, offering a fanciful portrayal in animation of a song by Canadian songwriter Wade Hemsworth, as arranged for tenor and piano by composer Cecilia Livingston.
The animated work came together in collaboration with students from OCAD University’s animation department.
Tenor Lawrence Wiliford sings in the film. He’s also the producer and consultant for The Wild Goose, along with serving as Co-Artistic Director and Managing Director of the Canadian Art Song Project.
We spoke to Lawrence, Jennifer and Larissa about the films.
The Interview
SWEAT
SWEAT, the film, grew from a live production of the opera.
“We had produced this opera for a live show in 2017,” explains Larissa Koniuk. As she relates, composer Juliet Palmer has already approached them about a Canadian premiere. “By a funny coincidence, I had been in the world premiere in New York City,” she says.
Larissa and the production team were immediately impressed with her work. Singers are trained in movement, but not to the same extent as dancers. The movements needed to be simplified, but still effective.
Plans were underway when COVID hit and put a halt to everything. “We had been trying to think of ways […] to make opera more accessible to regular people,” Larissa says of Bicycle Opera’s mandate. “It doesn’t have to be an elite art form.”
Bicycle performs operas in English or French, and toured their productions all over Ontario in venues like bars and art galleries. But, taking opera farther was always the goal, and film was on the horizon before the pandemic.
Grants for digital production during COVID made the decision easier. “We just saw the opportunity,” Larissa says.
The themes which emerge — global capitalism, and the fate of those at the bottom of the ladder, particularly in the garment industry — are as relevant now as they were a century ago.
An image that appears during the credits at the end reminds audiences that the garment industry hasn’t progressed much beyond its highly exploitive roots. “I think we wanted to make sure that, at the end of this horrendous story, that [people are aware] this is something that is still happening in the world,” says Jennifer Nichols. “It made it resonate by adding those photos.”
Cinematographer Ash Tailor-Jones has created an atmospheric film, set largely in appropriately industrial looking backgrounds. There is no machinery, however, or the usual factory sweatshop scenes consisting of rows and rows of desks with women working at the sewing machines.
Practical issues precluded filming in an actual factory setting. The film’s success, instead, relies on its atmosphere, choreography, and the emotions of the singers and dancers. Abstraction to a certain extent spotlights the emotions and characters. The scene of an industrial era warehouse is set only with a table and a few racks of clothing.
The choreography creates a cohesive community of workers who support each other as they work together.
“There’s so much that can be told with the body,” Jennifer explains. Movements replicate the actions of sewing on the machines. “It’s almost as if they become the machines themselves.” The choreographed and stylized unison movements are quite effective in conveying the work atmosphere. “It became the unifying aspect of the workers and how they supported themselves.”
It allows for interaction between the dancer/singers. “It lends intimacy,” Jennifer says. “Dance in itself is its own language. I was so blown away by the capacity of the singers to pick up complex patterns of movements.” A few professional dancers were added to the cast, but they are virtually indistinguishable from the non-dancer singers in their movements.
“It really hit home in a really simple way,” Jennifer says. “That’s one of the benefits of the medium of film — you can play with atmosphere.”
When the work room fills with smoke, the effect is claustrophobic. “It’s almost tangible,” Jennifer adds. “That’s the beauty of the intimacy of the camera.”
The Wild Goose
For The Wild Goose, the music is performed by both CASP Co-Artistic Directors, pianist Steven Philcox and tenor Lawrence Wiliford. Many Canadians have not heard of Wade Hemsworth, but many, many more are familiar with his songs The Log Driver’s Waltz, The Blackfly, and others. Those two songs were immortalized in animated shorts produced by the National Film Board, and The Wild Goose takes its inspiration from those imaginative films.
It also draws from the work of Group of Seven artist Thoreau MacDonald in its depiction of the relationship between settlers and the natural landscape.
Experimental Animation faculty member and Chair, Philippe Blanchard, headed the team of talented OCAD students who worked on the film.
“I’ve been trying to make something like this work for years,” says Lawrence.
Along with Bicycle Opera, he shares the recognition that the digital and multimedia realm is the way for the art form to reach more people. It’s not a question of either/or. In-person live performances will always have a place. But, they are not always accessible to everyone, for a number of reasons from financial concerns to physical disabilities and even geography.
“It was about trying to figure out how we can reach people and make classical music playful,” Lawrence stresses. The bar to access should be low.
Using a folk song with a kind of operatic treatment and an engaging animated film opens up the potential of classical music and opera to audiences who either can’t or won’t make it to a formal concert hall.
“That was the whole intention,” he adds.
“In the spirit of those NFB films, I wanted to start a little bit of a dialogue and see where that led,” Lawrence says.
He made the connections with OCAD’s animation department, and it became part of their learning in the field projects, using MacDonald’s illustration as a starting point.
Stage to Film
“The camera lends itself to an intimacy that you can’t quite achieve on stage,” says Jennifer. As she notes, you can also enter a dreamscape, or jump back and forth in time, as well as use slow motion and a view from 360 degrees around.
The film adaptation of SWEAT, in other words, creates a new work.
“It’s not a recording of a show — it’s an actual narrative film,” Jennifer says. “It will show people the possibilities of where we can take the art form, and how we can reach more people.”
Larissa notes that the film distribution system doesn’t encourage movies like SWEAT or The Wild Goose, even when its potential is seen at film festival screenings. “There’s no clear path to making this possible — we don’t have a distribution system in Canada — or a funding system,” she says. “We need to have platforms for that.”
As Jennifer notes, it can even be difficult on the film festival circuit. A film like SWEAT doesn’t readily fall into the specified categories of most festivals, which want to slot it into a more obscure dance or art film genre.
“[The system] needs to be more flexible,” Jennifer notes.
- Find information and tickets to the in-person screening at the Revue Cinema on June 15 [HERE]. The screening will be followed by a Q+A with the creative team.
- Stream SWEAT digitally anywhere in the world from Sunday, June 16 at 12:01 a.m. ET until Sunday, June 30 at 11:59 p.m. ET; register [HERE].
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