Colloquium - Presenters

ABSTRACT

To help celebrate Canada’s 1967 centennial anniversary, Harry Somers and Mavor Moore wrote an opera about the life and death of Métis leader Louis Riel. It quickly became one of the most popular and controversial Canadian operas. The Canadian Opera Company revived Louis Riel in 2017 as part of the Canada 150 celebrations, bringing together musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and various scholars in the arts to examine the representation of Métis and First Nations people and question whether it’s an appropriate production or a colonial relic in the time of Truth and Reconciliation. Louis Riel has been used to build new national mythologies (Braz), removing the Métis-ness from Métis history while appropriating their social values as Canadian values (Simonot-Maiello 2018). Somers engaged in musical theft from the Nisga’a people with the Kuyas aria (or Song of Skateen) (Robinson). The 2017 revival director Peter Hinton created the Land Assembly, a silent chorus of Indigenous people, to bear witness and challenge audiences to consider Indigenous/settler relationships in the present day, thus evolving and changing historiographies to align with contemporary values and power dynamics (Danckert). Many discussions have focused on theoretical, historical, and political perspectives, with little consideration of the personal. I will present a brief history of the opera for context and an autoethnography of my experiences in the Land Assembly related to the aforementioned critiques. I will speak about the often contradictory realities of being a Métis person participating in Louis Riel and recount the different bodily and emotional sensations of performing a story intimately related to my not-so-distant family history versus performing canonical repertoire. Although this is my personal story and not indicative of all First Nations and Métis people in the 2017 production Louis Riel, I believe my story helps to fill a gap in the scholarship surrounding this controversial opera.

 

KEYWORDS
Métis, Indigenous, Opera, Colonial, Canada, Louis Riel, Twentieth Century Opera, Nationalism

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BIO

Robyn Grant-Moran is a writer with a diverse background in music, theatre, and cultural criticism. Holding a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in music, Robyn specialized in classical singing, which laid the foundation for her deep engagement with music and performance. Currently pursuing her Master’s in Musicology at York University, Robyn’s research focuses on Indigenous representation in Canadian opera. Robyn is a regular contributor to The Grind as a theatre critic and arts writer. Her work has also been published in The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and other prominent outlets. Here, she combines her experience as a musician with her passion for theatre criticism. Robyn helped create and host Key Change, a Canadian Opera Company podcast where she regularly spoke with established Canadian and international artists about contemporary issues within opera. A member of the Circle of Artists, she is committed to advancing the dialogue around inclusion and Indigenous representation in Canadian opera. Her academic and professional endeavors highlight her dedication to amplifying historically underrepresented voices and fostering a greater understanding of the complex relationships between music, identity, and representation in Canada’s cultural landscape.