Join us for an intimate workshop performance of the TAR SANDS SONGBOOK, a personal exploration using song and storytelling, created by Tanya Kalmanovitch. The performance will be followed by an informal feedback discussion.

About the performance:

Created by musician, author and activist Tanya Kalmanovitch, TAR SANDS SONGBOOK is an 80-minute solo performance that combines field recordings, storytelling, personal history, and live violin and fiddle music to investigate our invisible relationships to oil.

Tanya Kalmanovitch knows these relationships all too well. Born in Fort McMurray, Canada, near the site of the world’s largest bitumen reservoir, she made her decision to become a musician as a teenager because “it had nothing to do with oil.” But when Fort McMurray shot to international attention as the flashpoint of clashes over energy, the environment, and the economy she was called to go home. Tanya’s polyphonic piece weaves together storytelling, original research, field recordings, photography, and a live, improvised musical score. Her singular narrative gathers together the voices of First Nations elders, activists, oil patch workers and members of her own family into an arresting meditation on our complicity in extractivist culture. With a fiddle in one hand and a laptop computer filled with sounds and images from Fort McMurray in the other, Tanya’s first-hand stories, visuals, and sounds place audiences at the centre of a place they might not see, but that has everything to do with how we all live today.

FREE: RESERVE YOUR SEAT HERE

Written, performed, composed, and produced by: Tanya Kalmanovitch

Dramaturgy: Katie Pearl, with additional dramaturgy by Vicki Stroich

Associate Producer: Louise Casemore

Artistic Consultant: Glynis Rigsby

Piano and Music Direction: Andrew Boudreau

Traditional Knowledge Consultants: Cleo Reece, Sheldon Hughes

Logo Design: Wall On The Fly

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Tishman Environment and Design Center, The New School’s Faculty Research Fund, Futures/Forward, and the MAP Fund.

Please contact Associate Producer Louise Casemore at lcasemor@ualberta.ca for more information or questions about the TAR SANDS SONGBOOK.