Adoration: Opera in the 21st Century

Welcome! It is my absolute pleasure to welcome you all back to another summer of Opera at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. 

This summer, we welcomed 15 participants to come and experience opera at Banff Centre. We offered positions to singers, pianists, stage directors, librettists and composers. We supported these participants by providing a world class faculty to work with them on all the skills needed to not only survive but thrive in the world of arts in 2023.

Our programming/training this summer focused on creation and working with living composers as well as exploring Mozart and Da Ponte’s great work Don Giovanni. Don Giovanni is a collaboration between the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and Banff Centre.  Participants had the chance to travel to Ottawa and work with a world class orchestra and understudy a professional cast of singers.  Now they bring those skills to Banff and perform for you all in the mountains.   

You’ll also see a brand new opera workshopped called Adoration. Music by Mary Kouyoumdjian and text by Royce Vavrek based on the film by Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan. This work features our faculty member Miriam Khalil (as well as many talented participants) and is conducted by Alan Pierson. Creation is the way forward and a skill that is becoming more important than ever.

Opera at Banff Centre will continue to thrust forward, while acknowledging and building on the foundations of the past.

Finally, I would like to thank the team here at Banff Centre for providing the support needed for us to achieve the success we are all striving for. They allow us to dream bigger and accomplish more. I hope to see you at the opera this summer.

Sincerely,

Joel Ivany
Artistic Director, Opera

This house program highlights the team of artists working on Adoration as part of the Opera in the 21st Century program. For a full list of faculty and participants for this year's Opera in the 21st Century program, please click here.

This performance will have a short post-show talk with some of the artistic team.
The performance is 90 minutes and there will be no intermission.

Please turn off all cellphones, photo/video cameras.

Cast List (full team is listed in the credits below):

Jamal Al Titi - Tom
Mishael Eusebio - Simon
Yanik Gosselin - Sami
Miriam Khalil - Sabine
Justine Ledoux - Rachel
Luke Noftall - Morris

Mary Kouyoumdjian - Composer
Royce Vavrek - Librettist
Alan Pierson - Conductor
Anna Davidson - Stage Manager
Daniel Schlosberg - Sound Engineer
Frances Thielmann - Rehearsal Repetiteur

An adaptation of Atom Egoyan's film of the same name, Adoration follows Simon, an orphaned high school student. As part of a dramatic writing exercise, Simon's teacher encourages him to appropriate details from a historical terrorist attack as an event perpetrated by his parents. When his story goes viral, Simon uses the hysteria within his community and on the internet to highlight the challenges of intolerance and racism in our society. 

The fictional and actual circumstances of the loss of Simon's family are revealed in fragments, only fitting together with the final revelation that the prejudices of Simon's maternal grandfather led to his parents' death.