Concert at Haida House: Melody Courage Responds to Tania Willard

A year after it was first performed and in collaboration with composer Patrick Carrabré, Métis soprano Melody Courage will interpret Tania Willard’s Woodpile Score (2018) through vocal performance at Haida House outside the Museum of Anthropology, UBC on Thursday, November 18 at 11 am. In the fall of 2020, Courage performed this same work as part of the exhibition Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery for an online audience. As The Score Research Cluster enters its second year and with the possibility of in-person events a reality again, the Belkin, the School of Music and the Chan Centre for Performing Arts and with the support of the Museum of Anthropology are thrilled to revisit this performance by Courage.

As part of Soundings, Tania Willard’s Surrounded/Surrounding included a wood-burning fire bowl, etched leather camp stools and a life-sized rendering of the artist’s wood pile in a graphic score. Written on the split logs and the spaces between them are references to the breathing, beating labour that creates what a fire needs, as well as the trees, sun, sky and ground that surrounds and creates all else.  Cursive text adorns the twelve camp stools, shifting from embraced to embracing, from enclosed to enclosing. The installation anticipated the event it was proposing and these words evoked the transition from proposition to action.

During the course of the Soundings exhibition, Melody Courage worked with composer Patrick Carrabré to interpret and respond to Willard’s Woodpile Score, reflecting on the themes of Surrounded/Surrounding in vocal performance. Due to COVID-19 restrictions at the time, the event took place online, with Tania Willard hosting an Instagram Live event from Secwépemc Territory, where she lit a fire and asked people to join her remotely as witnesses.  The Belkin joined Willard with documentation of Melody Courage’s performance.

Photo (above): Still from Melody Courage performing Tania Willard's Woodpile Score in November 2020. Image by Aya Garcia.