Against the Grain Theatre's music director Topher Mokrzewski conducts Bound while David Trudgen, right, sings the story of Kelly Davidson.
Against the Grain Theatre has opened its short run of Bound v.2, in the comfortably shabby Great Hall of Toronto’s Theatre Centre on Queen St. W. The v.2 in the title denotes the second iteration of Bound, following the first in 2017, and preceding its third and final version yet to come. Companies often have long-term plans for their productions even after they have been presented publicly, yet it’s rare for creators to fully disclose that their work is ongoing. The honesty seemed to work to AtG’s advantage, bringing their audience in on the unfinished project; everybody likes to feel like they have the inside scoop, after all.
At its simplest, Bound is the convergence of two elements: first, the suggestion by Alexander Neef, general director of the Canadian Opera Company, that Against the Grain Theatre – the company famed for taking traditional opera and turning it inside-out, to delightful results – do a “Handel mash-up.”
The other element was 2016 and the events of that year. When everyone and everything seemed to return to politics, so did the creative venture of pulling the arias of George Frideric Handel out of their original operas in order to tell a new story. The narrative that emerged was the parallel stories of four people detained by a fictional government, dubbed The State. We get precious few details about why and for how long each of them is detained, yet it’s clear that theirs are stories of “othering,” of having some quality – race, religion, gender – that earns them the State’s close scrutiny.
Musically, the work’s source material is a selection of arias from Handel operas, the tunes sung to new English text by AtG artistic director Joel Ivany, and with the score reworked by composer Kevin Lau. And as a production, Bound toes the line of interactive theatre; audience members are not greeted by ushers, but “processed” and sent abruptly through “security;” in place of a program they are given a passport-like booklet that is stamped, and filled with fictional propaganda (a fascinating redundancy if there ever was one). What we do learn about the characters, through Ivany’s brief spoken introduction, reveals a sense of tokenness – a Muslim woman, a transgender man – as though they were plucked from a newly revamped collection of stock personae.
Miriam Khalil sings the story of a Muslim woman, Noor Haddad in Kevin Lau's Bound.
The leaflets, the blinking red lights of watchful cameras, the pre-recorded doublespeak playing on loop over a loudspeaker – it’s a bold, even heavy-handed way to introduce Bound before the first notes are even heard. Paired with the cacophony of the orchestra tuning and warming up, it’s all a bit nightmarish. Ivany always does like to make sure his characters and his audience share some of the same experiences.
Yet even in its unfinished state, Bound doesn’t need any of the overselling that preceded it. Lau’s brilliant creation evokes quite enough nausea and unease, starting with the eerily familiar-yet-fake “national anthem.” His is a vivid palette of orchestra colours, a spectrum broadened further by the electronic work of sound designer Acote, and the inspired conducting by AtG music director Topher Mokrzewski.
Lau’s score is perhaps rooted in a style that is Handelian, and he makes lovely use of some of the old master’s tunes (Handel did his fair share of “borrowing,” after all), but he constantly breaks free from the baroque and into sound worlds that tell of the detainees’ despair, anger, and crazed defiance. His musical language turns the orchestra into a storytelling medium, one that surrounds the individual stories of Naveen Dewan (Andrew Haji), Ahmed Habib (Justin Welsh), Kelly Davidson (David Trudgen), and Noor Haddad (Miriam Khalil). Apparently Bound was Lau’s first foray into writing for the voice; armed with support of the voice-friendly Handel, the composer seems an astonishingly quick study.
Most interestingly, this uncluttered presentation of Bound answered the most pressing question I had about the piece before hearing it: why use Handel at all? I had to understand why, when there’s a skilled composer in the house and a seriously contemporary story to tell, Against the Grain Theatre would tether themselves to the disconnect of arias written in another world, for another reason.
The simple answer is that Bound was born out of a challenge to rework Handel’s music. Yet, serendipitously, Handel’s life and music lends itself to a piece about social justice. Charity was a large part of Handel’s life – his generosity to London’s Foundling Hospital is still commemorated today – and he acutely understood trauma and its lasting social effects. The formidable opera director Peter Sellars describes the “clinical precision” with which Handel writes of trauma, that “he knew how to write a mad scene because he knew what it was like to go mad and to desperately try to hold onto your sanity.”
And Handel’s music, Western European as it may be, is somehow a grand equalizer for listeners. His are not the very first operas, but there is something Ur-opera about his aesthetic, something original, in the deepest sense of the word. Handel’s arias are undoubtedly dramatic, yet his music can be chameleonic, supporting the drama of a wide spectrum of crises.
Bound may not be finished, but the piece already has legs and life of its own. Lau’s score supports a timely story of human rights. The piece may never evolve into an opera in the most traditional sense, but in its current state, it has great power as a sort of secular oratorio. I couldn’t help but recall Britten’s War Requiem, where the small stories of personal experience weave together to decry its broad message of denouncing violence and prejudice.
Bound runs at The Great Hall, 1087 Queen St. West, through November 21 at 8 p.m. For details and tickets, visit againstthegraintheatre.com/bound/.