Back in 2020 when the pandemic lockdowns were at their worst, and racial tensions put the Black Lives Matter movement in headlines across the continent, Baritone Elliot Madore took to social media to express himself, like so many.
In a very personal post, Madore talked about his struggles with identity as a bi-racial man.
“Eventually, I tried to dodge that question altogether, rationalizing that it was easier to avoid the conversation than having to convince someone of my own authenticity. […]
“Needless to say, unabashedly expressing my own identity is something I’ve sorely lacked until this day.”
Then Artistic Director of Against the Grain Theatre Joel Ivany saw the post and reached out to talk about the possibility of turning that expression into creation. Identity: A Song Cycle was the eventual result, and it became a video project that debuted in 2022 after the pandemic.
With new songs and staging, the live concert version will see its world premiere on May 23 and 24 in the Marilyn and Charles Baillie Theatre on Berkeley Street.
The songs weave together personal stories with music that blends elements of jazz and Western classical music. The music for Identity: A Song Cycle was composed by Dinuk Wijeratne to poetry by Shauntay Grant. Joel Ivany directs, with musicians Nick Halley (percussion), Tyler Emond (bass), and Dinuk Wijeratne on piano.
Baritone Elliot Madore
Elliot Madore is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music. He was a recipient of the 2010 George London Award for a Canadian Singer from the George London Foundation, and the ARIAS Emerging Young Artist Award from Opera Canada, among other competition prizes and awards.
His professional career has seen him perform with some of the world’s most prominent opera companies and orchestras throughout North America, Europe, and in Asia. This season, he made his role debut singing the title role in Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet with Opéra de Montréal, among many other engagements. Recent and upcoming performances include performances of Orff’s Carmina Burana with the Colorado Symphony, and Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass with the Reno Philharmonic.
As a recording artist, he appears on the Grammy Award-winning recording of L’heure espagnole and L’enfant et les sortilèges, singing the roles of Le chat and L’Horloge Comtoise. The recording was conducted by Seiji Ozawa at the Saito Kinen Festival.
Today, in addition to his performing engagements, Elliot is Associate Professor of Voice with the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music faculty.
Composer Dinuk Wijeratne
Sri Lankan-Canadian Dinuk Wijeratne is a conductor, composer and pianist. Wijeratne grew up in Dubai, and studied music at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, UK, and at The Juilliard School in New York City at the invitation of Oscar-winning composer John Corigliano. His family moved to Canada in 2005, and today he’s based in Ottawa.
He made his Carnegie Hall debut while still a student in 2004 as a composer, conductor, and pianist performing with Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble.
Among other awards and accolades, he won both a JUNO Award and East Coast Music Award for Classical Composition of the Year in 2016 for his piece Two Pop Songs on Antique Poems.
With a broad perspective on music and genre, Dinuk has written a variety of compositions for orchestral instruments, including full orchestras and string quartets, and has collaborated with tabla players and DJs too. He’s equally at home at the Berlin Philharmonie and the North Sea Jazz Festival. He has appeared at the BoulezSaal (Berlin), Kennedy Center (Washington DC), Opéra Bastille (Paris), Lincoln Center (New York), Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires), and in Sri Lanka, Japan, and across the Middle East.
Author/Poet Shauntay Grant
Shauntay Grant is an author, poet, playwright, and Associate Professor at Dalhousie University. She served as the third poet laureate of Halifax, Nova Scotia between 2009 and 2011.
Shauntay earned a BMus degree from Dalhousie University, followed by a BJ from the University of King’s College, and MFA from the University of British Columbia. Today, she is based in Kjipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki (Halifax, Nova Scotia).
She has written plays, novels, poetry, spoken word pieces, and children’s books, among other things.
Her writing has won multiple awards and honours, including a Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Writing and Publishing from the Canada Council for the Arts, a Robert Merritt Award for her stage play The Bridge, and a Poet of Honour prize from the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word.
Among her best known works are Africville, a children’s book created with illustrator Eva Campbell about the Black community of the same name, which won a Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award .
- Identity will have three performances on May 23, and 24. Find more details about the performances and get tickets [HERE].
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