Join us for an intimate performance of the Tar Sands Songbook, which is touring along the Trans-Mountain pipeline route in November 2023.
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.
Kalmanovitch knows these relationships all too well. Born in Fort McMurray, AB, 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. Kalmanovitch’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 extra-activist culture. With a fiddle in one hand and a laptop computer filled with sounds and images from Fort McMurray in the other, Kalmanovitch’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.
Her performance will be followed by an informal feedback discussion.
The event is free to attend but you are asked to RSVP through Eventbrite at https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/tar-sands-songbook-tickets-732203519437?aff=oddtdtcreator&fbclid=IwAR2uA8thp1Dqm18cxuv3xeHTgKneG_1ywBvPvunUlOzwdffgJ1CttN2g5j8
Monday, Nov 27, 2023
5 pm
UFV Theatre on Abbotsford campus
Building D, room D105
Contact Louise Casemore, associate producer, at lcasemor@ualberta.ca for more information about the Tar Sands Songbook, or email Jocelyn Thiessen at jocelyn.thiessen@ufv.ca.
11/28/2023