Festival de la Voix returns for ninth season
Workshops, concerts celebrate diversity of genres
This year, Vox Aeterna's Festival de la Voix returns just as spring is about to begin. Opening on Saturday after a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, long-empty concert halls, churches and studios will once again be filled with the sound of the human voice during the concerts and workshops planned for this year's festival.
Vox Aeterna, the West Island organization that oversees the threeweek festival, has planned seven concerts celebrating a diversity of musical genres and four workshops for voice students.
“It's like a gift ... especially now after the pandemic when so much time was spent waiting for something to happen,” said Eda Holmes, artistic and executive director of Centaur Theatre, who will be leading a workshop for singers called Acting and Physicalizing Text.
For this dancer turned theatre director, working with singers “is a privilege.” After a career as a soloist with San Francisco Ballet, Dutch National Ballet and William Forsythe's Frankfurt Ballet, Holmes turned toward theatre and attended Montreal's National Theatre School in the directing program.
“NTS gave me this wonderful education around storytelling and narrative,” said Holmes.
Her new-found passion for telling stories lead her to directing and being the associate director at the Shaw Festival before returning to Montreal to become the artistic and executive director of Centaur in 2017. While at the Shaw her musicality and physicality found their way into several musicals and plays that drew widespread critical acclaim. Her work with various opera companies, including Calgary Opera, the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, and most recently as the director of the Mcgill Chamber Orchestra's concert version of Carmen, speak to her continuing love of finding ways to help performers discover authenticity and depth of meaning in the texts they are working with.
“Like many retired dancers, we maintain a kind of relationship to the expressive capacity of our own bodies ... and this certainly manifests in everything I do,” said Holmes.
The workshop she will be leading is on March 26, from 1 to 4 p.m. at St. Columba-by-the-lake Church in Pointe-claire.
“Your voice comes out of your whole body not just your mind or your face,” said Holmes. “I am going to focus on ... how text and music come together ... I want to give people a chance to work organically with their bodies ... so that they can take a piece of music and then find ways to unearth the song.”
With this spring 's gradual opening of concert halls, theatres and performance venues, singers like the many performers who will be part of Festival de la Voix, are once again beginning to be able to do what they love to do — sing for audiences.
“It's why we all do what we do. It is to communicate with the audience,” said Holmes as she reflected upon Centaur's own reopening.
This year marks the Festival de la Voix's ninth season and the waiting is finally over for performers and audiences alike. Founded in 2012 by singer-songwriter and voice teacher Kerry-anne Kutz, along with Sonia Castiglione and Sheila Faour-warren, the festival highlights a wide range of vocal styles, and this year there will be concerts by artists including Ensemble Obiora that promotes musicians from different cultural backgrounds and little-known composers of colour, the Choeur de chambre du Québec, the IMANI Gospel Singers, Ranee Lee and her orchestra and the Ste-anne Singers, an a cappella ensemble.
The series of concerts will take place at predominately West-island locations including two in Pointe-claire, two in Dorval, one in each of Beaconsfield and Hudson, and a final one at the Unitarian Church of Montreal in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.
The Festival de la Voix 2022 runs from Saturday to April 10.
For more, visit festivaldelavoix.com or facebook.com/ festivaldelavoixmtl.