Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale gets a modern reworking with a new libretto and award-winning cast and creative team in what will be the final production for Toronto’s Art of Time Ensemble. Sankofa: The Soldier’s Tale Retold will be presented by Art of Time in association with The Royal Conservatory’s Glenn Gould School and Koffler Arts.
The world premiere premiere production will feature a new libretto by poet Titilope Sonuga, and Tawiah M’carthy will direct. Performances will run from October 24 to 27, 2024 in the Harbourfront Centre Theatre.
Andrew Burashko, Artistic Director, Art of Time Ensemble comments, “I believe in this project with all my heart. Re-envisioning Stravinsky’s score with a new narrative and staging that speaks directly to one of the most pressing social and political movements of today allows for new ownership, new authorship, and new audiences. It is an important and opportune moment for such creative and radical experimentation.”
Sankofa: The Soldier’s Tale Retold
According to Stravinsky’s notes, the work is to be “lue, jouée et dansée” (read, played, and danced) by three actors, one or more dancers, and an instrumental septet. The music for the opera was composed for clarinet, bassoon, cornet, trombone, percussion, violin and double bass, and will be performed by seven musicians from the Glenn Gould School.
The original libretto was written by Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, based on Alexander Afanasyev’s story The Runaway Soldier and the Devil.
Titilope’s new libretto tells the story of a soldier who’s trying to enlist in the army during WWI, set into the real history of the No. 2 Construction Battalion, Canada’s only battalion of Black soldiers to serve during the conflict. The Soldier in this story, as in the original, is set up for a battles of wits with the Devil, but what’s new is a resilience born of struggling against racism and erasure.
The Sankofa bird serves as a symbol; the word sankofa comes from the Ghanaian Twi language, meaning to retrieve something that was forgotten. The poetic libretto blends future and past, looking at history in a realistic light, while still allowing for a better future.
Cast & Creatives
Librettist Titilope Sonuga is a poet, playwright and performer, the author of three poetry collections: Down to Earth (2011), Abscess (2014), and This Is How We Disappear (2019), and two spoken word albums, Mother Tongue (2011) and Swim (2019). She has written three plays: The Six, Naked, and Ada the Country (a musical). As a performer, she played a lead role as an actor in the hit Nigerian television series Gidi Up. She was named the 9th Poet Laureate of the City of Edmonton in 2021-2023.
Ghanaian-Canadian actor, playwright and director Tawiah M’carthy studied theatre at York University, and has worked with Toronto’s SummerWorks Festival, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, and the English Theatre Ensemble at the National Arts Centre, among others. He has directed productions for Canadian Stage / Obsidian Theatre, the Stratford Festival, and Young People’s Theatre.
The cast features:
- Diego Matamoros, well known in the world of stage, TV, film, radio, and voice animation, will play the Devil, and Wade Bogert-O’Brien is Devil understudy;
- Ordena Stephens-Thompson, probably best known for her starring role in Da Kink in My Hair, will be Narrator, a role that both narrates and impersonates multiple minor characters;
- Olaoluwa Fayokun, a recent graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada, will be Soldier.
Andrew Burashko will serve as conductor and musical director, with lighting design by Kevin Lamotte, costume design by Des’ree Gray, and sound design by John Gzowski.
- Find more information about performances, and tickets, [HERE].
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