Tapestry Opera Presents TAP:EX TABLES TURNED, 3/20-21

TAP:EX (Tapestry Explorations) is TAPESTRY OPERA's annual experimental production that looks to define the future of opera. This year's installment, TABLES TURNED, is where opera meets a DJ and turntables in a boundary-breaking multi-media concert. Vocal powerhouse Carla Huhtanen and pioneering composer Nicole Lizée join forces to reconfigure iconic moments in film and opera in a captivating display of electronic and vocal virtuosity.

Remixed clips from Alfred Hitchcock films, The Sound of Music, and video recordings of Maria Callas are projected alongside the performers, whose turntables and vocals fight and fuse in a live duet blurring the lines between what is real and what is re-imagined.

Montreal-based composer, turn table artist, and electronics specialist, Nicole Lizée is a musical scientist creating new music from an eclectic mix of influences including early MTV videos, Hitchcock and Kubrick films, 1960s psychedelia and modernism, and rave culture. Her commission list of over 40 works is varied and distinguished, ranging from works for orchestra and solo turntablist, featuring DJ techniques fully notated and integrated into a concert music setting, to other unorthodox instrument combinations that include the Atari 2600 video game console. In 2013, Nicole received the prestigious Canada Council for the Arts Jules Leger Prize for New Chamber music.

One of Canada's foremost interpreters of contemporary music, Soprano Carla Huhtanen is in demand internationally for her soaring and translucent voice. For TAPESTRY, Carla first performed in The Shadow, by Omar Daniel, and has since developed and premiered many roles in the Librettist/Composer Lab and Opera Briefs performances and is an instructor at "Opera 101″ workshops. Dora Award-nominated for her performance of Susanna The Marriage of Figaro with Opera Atelier, Carla has been praised for her "vivid, fine-toned, accurately placed coloratura" (Independent).

Now in its second year, TAP:EX is committed to evolution through innovation, exploring modes where the traditional genre of opera can assume a living, current form. In its year of inception, TAP:EX took the language of contemporary dance and physical theatre and fused them with opera.

TAPESTRY OPERA, currently celebrating its 35th season, is committed to defining the future of opera with stories that both reflect and comment on the present day, with a language and style that is both familiar and surprising. TAPESTRY will go further and push harder to explore new worlds of sound that ignite the imaginations of artists, championing and consolidating a Canadian repertoire for the world stage.

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