Hannah Bellamy | Sad Mag

Within the emerging movement of community queer choirs, Cor Flammae has a distinct voice. There are many opportunities for queer people to sing together, but not many opportunities for audiences to listen to a professional queer ensemble perform queer content. Cor Flammae performs both modern and historical classical music with the aim of shifting the assumed perspective from a hetero-normative one to a queer one.

Sad Mag sat down with Missy Clarkson, who founded the ensemble with her wife Amelia Pitt-Brooke, and friend Madeline Hannan-Leith to talk about the choir, upcoming concerts, and re-queering the world of classical music.

Cor Flammae, Photo by belle ancell photography

Sad Mag: When and why did you start Cor Flammae?

Missy Clarkson: We came to the idea two years ago when we attended the Queer Arts Festival. There was a lesbian opera called “When the Sun Comes Out” by Leslie Uyeda. We are into classical music and opera subscribers. We didn’t know what was going to happen with lesbian opera. We didn’t necessarily have expectations. But it was amazing. It was sweeping and grand, poignant and lovely, and not too sad–sometimes queer work is very lament-y. Many of us are in ensembles in the city, and we wanted that for choir.

SM: It sounds like there was a niche that needed to be filled, and you found it.

MC: We were surprised with how much momentum it had. There are a lot of places for queer people to sing together in the city, but there aren’t a lot of places where an audience can experience classical music at a professional level with a queer ear.

SM: What can audiences expect from a performance?

MC: Last year, we introduced ourselves as quite secular. We chose secular works because there is baggage with queerness and organized religion. It can be an unsafe space for queer people. Because there is rich religious traditions to choral music–it was written to be performed in churches for the most part–it is an interesting genre for queer people to be exploring and doing professionally. This year, we didn’t want to miss out on having that conversation so we’re approaching the relationship between the sacred and the profane through a queer perspective in our performances. Queers have not necessarily felt welcome to choral music because of the religious traditions associated with it that have often labeled the queer body as profane, obscene, or unholy. We want to show our audience queer spirituality–all the composers we’re performing were/are queer and many were/are devout.

We’re producing two concerts. One of them is at the beautiful St. Andrew’s Wesley Church where we’re performing the music in the place for which it was written. Then we’re taking the same works and performing the next night in a social play space–a bath house essentially. It’s hat tipping the bathhouse tradition of queerness. Canada’s queer history started because of the bathhouse riots in Toronto. Where the United States had Stonewall in 1969, Canada had Operation Soap in 1981. Police officers raided bathhouses and arrested about three hundred queer men just for being queer. The public didn’t take well to that, and thousands of people took to the streets and marched the next day. It was first pride parade in Canada essentially. Cor Flammae is interested in how the listening experience changes when we perform choral music, historically deeply spiritual music, in the historically queer space of a sex club like Club 8×6.

SM: The audience gets to experience the music in a religiously charged space and a politically charged space.

MC: Totally. Obviously the acoustics are different in each space. And there’s going to be a dance party in the sex club after the performance so it’ll be a little different for that reason. [Laughs.]

SM: What are you most looking forward to about the upcoming set of concerts?

MC: Our outfits! They are a secret still.

SM: Don’t say any more about the outfits. It will be a teaser. Who has been your favourite historical composer to revive through Cor Flammae?

MC: There are so many composers that are hotly contested by scholars. [Franz] Schubert has been an interesting one for us because he was probably bisexual. He was hanging with lots of ladies, and probably hanging with lots of guys too. It’s a scandal to bring it up with any of the scholars. Really straight, traditional scholars are like, “No, not my Schubert.” We’ve also rediscovered Ethel Smyth, who was known for opera choruses. She was friends with [Johannes] Brahms, and she also had a complicated relationship with Virginia Woolf. She was loud, proud, a suffragette, and an out lesbian. She was rich so that made it easier for her to be all over. She had privilege that afforded her opportunity. She got to spread her works around, and make out with everybody. [Laughs.]

We also work with living queer composers. Classical music celebrates the past more often so new works don’t get traction. People want to hear things they have heard before. They want to hear Beethoven’s Ninth [Choral Symphony]. New music is less sellable. Cor Flammae can combine these two worlds. We can celebrate the past and connect it to the present.

SM: How does your experience in Cor Flammae compare to your experience in other ensembles?

MC: It’s illuminating. The first time we got together as an ensemble after our auditions was at our photo shoot. We had oranges and brandy and hung out for hours getting makeup and hair done. There was comfort and understanding immediately. That’s translated to this year. We had our photo shoot a few weeks ago, and we were all half-naked. I don’t get half-naked in front of just anybody. The queerness factor causes that comfort and connection, and that relates to the music as well. People have said, “Oh, I didn’t know this person was queer or that person was queer.” It’s not mentioned elsewhere. When we were researching [Gian Carlo] Menotti’s “The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore” to perform last year, we found queerness wasn’t mentioned in the scholarship. There’s a unicorn in it so it’s pretty gay already, but it’s the story of a weird guy in a castle who dares to parade around with his unicorn. It was written in 1956. It’s a very queer narrative. Any research we did seemed like it was grasping at heteronormative straws when the guy is clearly gay. Doing Menotti has been illuminating. Benjamin Britton has been illuminating. The way I listen to music has changed so that’s what I want to give our audiences.

SM: What music are you listening to right now?

MC: Personally, I mostly listen to music I’m going to perform so I can get it in my ear. We always make a playlist for our singers because we have limited rehearsals. We have seventy-five minutes of music in our upcoming concerts, and to build it up to the level it needs to be at, we have to work hard. I have to stay pretty focused with what I listen to. If I need to clean my ears out though, it’s almost always Beyoncé.

SM: Do you have a comment you would offer to queer performers of classical music? Maybe people who don’t live in the city or don’t know about a queer ensemble.

MC: This has been so freeing for us. We’re trying to be as visible as possible because visibility is a powerful tool in helping other people feel less alone. I’ve sung in choirs that are probably 30 per cent queer but don’t identify as a queer choir. Because of the connection in Cor Flammae, we feel less alone. My wife grew up in a musical family–her father was a choral conductor and her mother sang in choirs, but the women were taught to sing this and the men were taught to sing that. A women would have to wear a muumuu, and she could not wear a suit when she was more comfortable in a suit. We want to be visible so that everyone feels invited, even if they are not here. We’re pretty prevalent online, and we hope that we’re reaching people.

SM: You spoke earlier about the instant comfort and understanding your ensemble felt when you got together for your first photo shoot–that says it all. How has Cor Flammae affected your own queerness?

MC: It’s helped me articulate my own queerness. I’ve always identified as a chorister. I call myself a queerister now. It’s actually a thirteenth-century word that used to mean chorister. I feel like I’m different things that don’t necessarily intersect, and this ensemble helped with the intersection.

Cor Flammae’s concert set FALLEN ANGELS: Sacred + Profane Works will be at St. Andrew’s Wesley Church on July 17th, 2015 at 8pm and Club 8×6 on July 18th, 2015. Tickets go on sale June 1st 2015 at 10am. For more information, visit Cor Flammae’s webiste or subscribe to their mailing list.

Grit & Gristle artist Nicola Tibbetts has organized a new group exhibition for the North Vancouver Arts Council. On until July 26th, it features her work along with that of Ying-Yeuh Chuang and Ben Lee. Sad Mag talked with her about her donut painting on the back of the Grit & Gristle issue and her love of food.

Sad Mag: I was introduced to your work when one of your paintings was on the back of Grit & Gristle. The painting has Honey Cruller and Vanilla Dip donuts positioned on a stage of sprinkles and is part of a series that reimagines The Marriage of Figaro using Tim Hortons’ donuts in the place of actors. Each donut was given a character from the opera based on its appearance, texture, taste, and popularity. It was a perfect note to close the food issue and I think readers would be interested to know where the idea for this series came from.

Nicola Tibbetts: I had been using food as my subject for a few years at that point and was looking to put the foods into a context instead of painting them into flat saturated colour fields. I was sitting in Tim Hortons in Halifax drinking a hot chocolate and I began thinking of ways to do this. I realized that Tim Hortons donuts were a perfect “food” to anthropomorphize and play with because of the variety of textures, colours, shapes, fillings, and associations people have with certain varieties.

I chose The Marriage of Figaro as my narrative because it’s a ridiculous and melodramatic opera, which exaggerates the absurdity of anthropomorphizing donuts. I liked that Tim Hortons donuts are the epitome of low quality food while opera is one of the most bourgeois and “high art” of art forms.

SM: I’ve been looking at your work and food is common to all your series. Could you give a little context to your interest in food?

NT: I’ve been interested in food for a long time. It began with baking and moved on to cooking when I realized meals were more important than dessert. Growing up we would talk about food, recipes, and our family food history around the dinner table and my sisters and I have continued that into our conversations today.

I love to read books and watch movies about food as well; two of my favourite books are The Art of Eating by MFK Fisher and Charlemagne’s Tablecloth by Nicola Fletcher. My favourite food films are ‘Tampopo’ by Juzo Itami and ‘The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover’ by Peter Greenway. Because I lead a food-centric life that’s all I want to make art about. For now.

SM: Many of your paintings anthropomorphize food and I think the result is at once humorous and elegant. Do you find the use of humour to be a balancing act?

NT: Sometimes the humour in my work is evident from the very beginning like in The Marriage of Figaro series while other times it becomes apparent later. I often appropriate ideas from art history and tend to choose stories and images that I find entertaining and strange which then find their way into my work. For Progress of Love series I copied the backgrounds and took the titles of French Rococo painter Honore Frangonard and inserted my own food characters where he had painted a courting couple. The Rococo genre was a very romantic, playful, and often frivolous period in art history and I wanted to heighten and exaggerate those aspects when I made my works. I’m not laughing at my ideas as I’m making the work but I do sometimes chuckle during an artist talk when I realize how crazy I must sound.

SM: Some of your work explores performance and theatre as well as food. Do you see an inherent connection between them or is there something else you are wanting to evoke in bringing them together?

NT: I think of cooking and serving food as performative even within my home. The series The Feast is inspired by medieval feasts, which were extremely performative. Every dish served had a specific history and meaning. In the Progress of Love series I took this concept even further by making the foods themselves the characters.

SM: You, Ying-Yeuh Chuang, and Ben Lee all use food as inspiration in your practice. What was your intention behind the exhibit with works from you three artists?

NT: The three of us have been colleagues in the Studio Art department at Capilano University for the last few years until the program was cut in April. Oddly I didn’t realize until about a year ago that our processes’ were so similar. I was interested in bringing together three very different practices that were united by the use of everyday objects like food to make curious and unexpected artworks. And in your words from earlier they also balance humour and elegance in their work. Basically I just love both of their work!

Processed with VSCOcam with m5 preset — ” I realized that Tim Hortons donuts were a perfect “food” to anthropomorphize…”

SM: Most of the pieces you have at the exhibit are from The Feast series, which imagines a banquet from beginning to end—untouched ingredients to dirty dishes. Was there a reason you brought this series to the context of this particular exhibit?

NT: Of all my paintings The Feast series is most focused on food and this exhibition highlighted food as subject. I felt that the minimalist nature of much of Ben and Ying-Yueh’s work also contrasted nicely with the abundance and excess in The Feast paintings.

Extraordinary will be on until July 26, 2014 at CityScape Community Arts Space in North Vancouver. More information about the exhibition and artists.

Two girls spreading rose petals lead the annual Women’s Memorial March this year. A group of elders proceeded behind them with their drums sounding. The march began with the intersection of East Hastings and Main Streets as the epicenter—overtaken with a women-led drum circle. Cable buses halted and marchers continued to gather. With the girls leading the march and the drum’s songs, a sense of togetherness and empowerment weaved through the hundreds of marchers. Something of this moment came back to me later that weekend, at Lauri Lyster’s The Drummer Girl.

Lyster's work evokes emotion. — Lyster’s work evokes emotion.

Comprised of both live music and personal stories, The Drummer Girl showed at the Firehall Arts Center from February 12 to 22. It begins with Lyster starting percussion lessons as a tween and moves through her career as a female percussionist—from her music degree and to dive bars, to symphonies, abroad, and more. “Being a woman, that has informed everything about my career,” she told Burnaby Now about the show. “But it’s more generic than that. It’s about being a musician.”

While the show handles the issue of being a female musician and just being a musician in forthright and intelligent ways, it also has a propulsive sense of humour. In one of the storytelling interludes, she describes being a percussionist in an orchestra. She sits on a chair with a music stand before her and has the audience imagine that she is in the orchestra pit. She then reaches into her bag to retrieve a water bottle with a rope attached (as she fastens it to the music stand, she tells the audience this is a precaution since one got away from her on stage at symphony), several issues of People Magazine (for her forty-minute rests, she confesses), and her triangle.

The last thing an audience wants to do is make a sound during a symphony, but the audience laughed through Lyster’s entire reenactment of a percussionist’s role in an orchestra. It included about four triangle hits, two naps, a little celebrity gossip, and a deadpan conclusion from the percussionist after she silenced the triangle: “Yeah, I’m classically trained.”

Later in the show she reenacts another performance in which she forgot her cymbals and drumsticks and had to improvise with a wooden frame broken in two and a beer bucket. She literally brings out a beer bucket, snaps a stick in half on stage, and plays the song with her band as she had to that night.

She tells these stories—both the successful and the not so successful—with a combination of dignity and humour that is a pleasure to watch. As this was the third year she ran the show, we can hope that it will return to the stage again soon.

Check out other great shows coming up at Firehall Arts Centre.

Octopus Studios on Powell St. seems unapproachable with its whitewash exterior and barred windows, but it was busy and humming inside with the Eastside Culture Crawl the weekend of November 15-17.

There was a DJ in the corner near the entrance and 16 artists installed in the two-storey, open plan studio—one of 85 buildings involved in the Eastside Culture Crawl this year. It had a diverse selection of artists—weekend and fulltime artists, graduates and students, and art teachers promoting public art classes. One artist adjusted flickering projections on the wall and others lingered near the booths, where ceramics, paintings, illustrations, leatherwork, and stringed instruments were exhibited beside each other.

1455087_690563970956799_707858666_n — Studios open their doors and let us in on the secrets behind the artwork.

The Eastside Culture Craw is focused in the area bound by Main Street, 1st Ave., Victoria Drive, and the Waterfront, and featured over 400 artists this year. As someone who doesn’t live in the area, or even as someone who does, the official map is a requisite in the hunt for the little studios many of us didn’t know where there.

Now an annual 3-day visual arts festival in November in which artists from the Eastside open their studios to the public, it began as a series of open studio fundraisers in the mid-90s. Paneficio Studios on Keefer St. held a fundraiser for Clayoquot Sound arrestees’ travel costs to Victoria – the series of logging protests that occurred over the summer of 1993 in Clayoquot Sound resulted in over 800 protestors arrested and many put on trial in front of the B.C. Provincial Court in Victoria.

Another fundraiser was held the following year to support Eastside artists with AIDS, and it was divided between Paneficio Studios and 1000 Parker St. Studio in order to host more work. It expanded the third year to include two more studios, Glass Onion and Apriori Studios, and the proceeds went to restoration following an Eastside neighbourhood fire. It expanded again the next year, with 45 artists and over 1000 attendees, and Eastside-based artists and founded board member Richard Tetrault named it the Eastside Culture Crawl.

1466118_690286527651210_700183937_n — The Crawl attracts people from all over the Lower Mainland.

While the Eastside Culture Crawl still seems imbedded in the Eastside where is began and continues to be focused, it is representative of the diverse communities of artists, both emerging and internationally recognized, currently working throughout Vancouver. I hope next year word about the event will spread further, as I think it is a show of Vancouver-based art more people should see.

For more information about the Eastside Culture Crawl or the Eastside Culture Crawl Society, visit them online. We hope to see you there next November.

Braced, a one-woman show written and preformed by Rebecca Steele, is a rendering of our formative years, when figuring out our passions seemed as difficult as figuring out who to sit with at lunch. But for Lauren Royal, the main character who’s dealing with scoliosis, development during these years was more obvious than most teens, represented by a hard, plastic, back brace that she wore for most of high school.

Steele makes the physical object around Lauren’s body – one that she awkwardly touches and adjusts while simultaneously trying to ignore throughout the show – something the audience can relate to emotionally. It is the embarrassment and frustration she experiences dealing with the back brace that reminds us of our own “braces” – characteristics or impediments that have defined us all.

Lauren is one of over a dozen characters Steele plays throughout the show. Steele’s theatrical skill is such that she can transform an empty stage into a waiting room full of bodies and commotion. Lauren slouches in her waiting chair, dreading an appointment with her doctor, while her fidgety mother, an unwell old man, an overly interested woman, and anxious mother with a child, and a nurse who excessively enunciates her words appear around her. All of these multifaceted characters are preformed distinctly and comically by Steele.

I was completely engrossed in her command over such a crowded scene until she, unfortunately, fumbled over a word and repeated part of the phrase before continuing. No performer wants to get caught on a work, but for me, this small error was a reminder of the endurance and skill needed for this kind of demanding performance.

The range within the character Lauren is also captivating. Based on Steele’s own struggles with scoliosis in her teenage years, the character has an interest in drama and a talent for impressions. From musical performances to impressions of Audrey Hepburn, it is no wonder that the character on stage is deeply engrained in Steele herself, who landed a place at the renowned Circle in the Square Theater School in New York City.

Following her graduation from Circle in the Square Theatre School, Steele went on to produce and preform her show Braced at the Midtown International Theatre Festival 2012 in New York City. It was nominated for four awards at the festival, including “Outstanding Production of a Play,” “Outstanding New Script for a Full Production,” “Outstanding Costume Design for a Full Production,” and “Outstanding Lead Actress in a Play (Full Production).”

Steele has toured the show through Canadian schools and has now brought it to her hometown for the Vancouver Fringe Festival 2013.

The wide recognition Steele has received for her story is a testament to the abandon with which she preforms it. She is able to transform her performance from tender to hilarious in a breath. A convincing example of reconciling our troubles with comedy, this performance will definitely move you.

For more information on Braced, including ticked information and show times, visit the show’s specific website. More details about the Vancouver Fringe Festival, which runs until September 15, can be found online.

Author Archives: Hannah Bellamy

Interview // Cor Flammae’s Missy Clarkson

Interview / Nicola Tibbetts

Review // Lauri Lyster’s The Dummer Girl

Crawling the Eastside

Fringe Review // Braced