Performance

pRODUCTIONS

2015

Julie Sits Waiting

2012

in this body

‘in this body’ EPK

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CONCEIVED + SUNG BY Fides Krucker
CHOREOGRAPHED + DANCED BY Peggy  Baker, Laurence Lemieux & Heidi Strauss
MUSIC ARRANGED & PLAYED BY Rob Clutton, Tania Gill, Germaine Liu

The wilderness of a woman’s heart, voiced through Canadian song and danced to the edge. Fides Krucker – one of Canada’s most original vocalists – and her ensemble are joined by three extraordinary dancers: Peggy Baker, Laurence Lemieux and Heidi Strauss. Together, they brave the landscape of our country’s great songbook – from Joni Mitchell, Alanis Morissette, and k.d. lang, to Lhasa de Sela, Feist, Hawksley Workman, Serena Ryder, and more. An emotional cartographer’s dream.

Hauntingly beautiful show. Experimental songstress Fides Krucker, dance royalty (Baker, Lemieux, Strauss) and three great musicians interpret Canadian songbook. Run don’t walk.”
Paul Citron

“This creation brings an exactness to the mysteries of the heart. Evocative lyrics, masterful choreography, brilliant performances!”
Margie Gillis O.C., C.Q. Dancer, Choreographer, Artistic director

 “Fides’ singing is emotive and transformative. The band is extremely tight and responsive, enveloping the singer’s profound and moving journey. Musical choices throughout are emotionally elegant and intriguing. The dialogue with the three dancers is an added artistic layer which augments the songs and deepens the viewers experience. I was overwhelmed by the emotional content of the show which is raw and exposed and opened me into an extremely vulnerable place.”
Eve Egoyan (pianist)

“The show was moving, heroic, funny, heartbreaking, and so beautifully poignant and musical.”
Peggy Shannon, Chair of Ryerson School of Performance.

“I was struck by the palpable femaleness of the work: how uncommon and powerful it felt; how the depth of embodiment equally challenged and supported me in remaining fully engaged through a work of great intensity; and how, in the immediacy of performance, this very female way of knowing was an entry point into the larger question of how any reality is established, honoured and maintained in relationship.”
Dawne Carleton

“While Fides’s sensibility shapes the show, it is truly a magnificent ensemble experience. From the inventive and moving band arrangements to the remarkably personal choreography, the personality and experience of each performer is clear.”
Alex Fallis

DIVE

FEATURING Fides Krucker Matthew Gouveia and Earl Pastko
DIRCTED BY Alex Fallis
COMPOSITION & SOUND DESIGN by Nik Beeson
FREELY ADAPTED BY Richard Sanger from Giuseppe Di Lampedusa’s “The Professor and the Siren

DIVE is a sonic theatre experience that brings to life a story about love, intimacy, and the deepest needs of men and women. Two Sicilians meet in a dark seedy bar in 1938: a young journalist (Matthew Gouveia) who has just lost both his girlfriends, and an old and eminent classics professor (Earl Pastko). As the professor grows to trust the young man, he reveals the secret that haunts him: his encounter with a radiant, amoral, Greek-speaking mermaid. This mermaid, in the guise of several females (Fides Krucker) accompanies them vocally through the darkly humorous text, forcing them to consider their own desires, connection to the past and their ability to follow the wild and divine. Through its electroacoustic score, and an immersive set-up, DIVE submerges the viewer in the world of the story, creating a visceral experience that leaves each member of the audience searching for their own mermaid in our contemporary world.

DIVE was developed with the continued support of Good Hair Day Productions (Julie Sits Waiting, Girl with no door on her mouth). DIVE premiered in the summer of 2015 at the ArrayMusic Studio in Toronto

The Mermaid: A Conversation with Fides Krucker – Julie Trimingham

‘Mussolini vs the Mermaid’ – BarczaBlog (July 29, 2015)

She’s enticing in the flesh, but it’s Krucker’s voice, both live and recorded, that’s truly a marvel….[…] As one of the characters says, no one escapes the sirens.
Jon Kaplan (NOW (NNNN), 6 August 2015)

This amazing genre-bending production offers something for everyone: utterly engaging theatre, a brilliant dramatic adaptation of a significant and timely work, Fides Kruker’s incredible vocal pyrotechnics, plus music/soundscape that envelopes all in its eerie beauty. It’s no surprise that it sold out in Toronto!
Linda Hutcheson (Professor Emeritus, English and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto)

I loved the combination of the quiet, realistic scenes—and it reminded me how much I had loved reading The Leopard for its passion about social ideas—and the operatic sections that seemed to erupt out of the action like Botticelli’s Venus out of the sea foam. I tried to place it with other shows I have seen (as one does) and couldn’t. It was, in fact, a unique experience for me as a theatregoer and so especially precious.
Craig Walker (Head of the Department of Drama, Queens University)

A wonderful and exceptionally intimate night of music theatre.
Atom Egoyan (Film and Opera Director)

…full of pithy dialogue and big laughs, sometimes bawdy, sometimes political. Pastko and Gouveia are a hugely likeable pair…Krucker’s performance is something to marvel at, in some of her characteristic uses of a trained voice to sound sometimes operatic, sometimes gently lyrical, sometimes taking on sounds that are superhuman with what sounds like extra over-tones. The experience is poised brilliantly on the edge between recollection and enactment, simultaneously in the present and the past, the Professor both young and old in the same moment. DIVE is a spectacular new creation.
Leslie Barcza (Barczablog)

a little rain never hurt no one

A Little Rain Never Hurt No One

Performance – Fides Krucker
Piano – Sageev Oore
Direction – Mark Christmann
Design – Laird Macdonald
Percussion – Rick Sacks

a tasty little cabaret to tease the ear and challenge the emotions.enter the pleasure and pain of tunes by:prince, tom waits, billie holliday, cole porter, leonard cohen, jane siberry and arnold schoenberg

“the trippy happy edgy, love-sexy, naughty performance was completely and simply spectacular“
Now Magazine

“AN EVENING SPENT WITH FIDES Krucker is always an extraordinary event. In her new cabaret work, A Little Rain Never Hurt No One (the title comes from a Tom Waits song that opens and closes the show), Krucker wails, croons and seduces the audience with material ranging from Arnold Schoenberg and Rodgers and Hart to Prince and Leonard Cohen.

With a smoky voice and amazing vocal technique, she can excite or chill the listener as she turns instantly from intentionally raspy notes to honeyed phrases. My Funny Valentine alternates angry expression and innocent enticement, while she turns Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Insensitive into a quiet, low-key monologue, accompanied by pianist Sageev Oore on a tinkly toy piano.

Krucker turns up the blues quotient with Dan Fisher’s Good Morning Heartache, plays on an empty olive-oil can as the musical break in The Girl From Ipanema — to which she adds tricky syncopation — and bounces vocal dissonances off Oore’s piano melody in Cole Porter’s Every Time I Say Goodbye. Hell, with her amazing control, she even uses her voice like a kazoo, sliding through the notes of Am I Blue? and finally turning it into a torch song to end all torch songs.”

Jon Kaplan – NOW Magazine

Chosen in the Now Magazine Top 10 of 2002!

the girl with no door
on her mouth

…a potent evening of interdisciplinary electroacoustic musical pieces, starring contemporary vocalist Fides Krucker and featuring the music of Gavin Bryars, Rainer Weins and a world premiere from Wende Bartley with libretto by Anne Carson.

Drawing on her “disturbing eloquence of voice and movement” (Toronto Star), the “magnificently gifted” (Vancouver Province) Krucker embarks on a visceral voyage through loss, destitution, transformation and beauty. Krucker will exercise her remarkable stage presence and vocal range to weave three differing pieces into one visceral theatrical voyage, taking the audience on an emotional journey that highlights the profound relationship between a human being’s existence and the environment. The intimate setting of Passe Muraille’s Backspace will also be transformed into a work of art through three-dimensional sculpture, light and sound. nocturnal marine phosphorescence, evoking both beauty and fragility.

Drawing on her “disturbing eloquence of voice and movement” (Toronto Star), the “magnificently gifted” (Vancouver Province) Krucker embarks on a visceral voyage through loss, destitution, transformation and beauty. Krucker will exercise her remarkable stage presence and vocal range to weave three differing pieces into one visceral theatrical voyage, taking the audience on an emotional journey that highlights the profound relationship between a human being’s existence and the environment. The intimate setting of Passe Muraille’s Backspace will also be transformed into a work of art through three-dimensional sculpture, light and sound. nocturnal marine phosphorescence, evoking both beauty and fragility.

The Mercy Suite exists in a tight, almost airless space of loneliness and alienation. Rainer Weins’ de-tuned, spare and ethereal guitar parts paint a landscape that is fragile, mystical and dangerous. The horrible truth of Mercy’s life comes to light through musical snapshots burdened by an internal homelessness that is part of the human heart. This monodrama on destitution is a reworking of sections of the character Mercy from Weins’ opera Down Here On Earth (a role performed by Krucker for Autumn Leaf Performance).

The girl with no door on her mouth“, a world premiere, is a collage of the award-winning Anne Carson’s most visceral poetry and Wende Bartley’s richly layered electroacoustic magic that mines the intimate feminine soul. It begins with Emily Dickinson escaping the weight of the patriarchy and then enters worlds where female characters explore the tension between mind and body while the performing space is saturated with the sensual.

The White Lodge is a sumptuous electroacoustic piece for voice and audiotape using a passage from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. Gavin Bryars music takes the audience deep into the resonances of the ocean while Krucker assumes the perspective of the novel’s Captain Nemo describing the haunting miracle of nocturnal marine phosphorescence, evoking both beauty and fragility. The Mercy Suite exists in a tight, almost airless space of loneliness and alienation. Rainer Weins’ de-tuned, spare and ethereal guitar parts paint a landscape that is fragile, mystical and dangerous. The horrible truth of Mercy’s life comes to light through musical snapshots burdened by an internal homelessness that is part of the human heart. This monodrama on destitution is a reworking of sections of the character Mercy from Weins’ opera Down Here On Earth (a role performed by Krucker for Autumn Leaf Performance).

 


PRESS

Krucker, who fashioned the libretto from various Carson writings, first came across the poet/essayist through her article The Gender of Sound. Carson is director of graduate studies in McGill’s classics department and her specialty area is Ancient Greece. The article describes how the voices of women of that time were controlled by the patriarchal society and how scholars have coined the phrase “sumptuous destitution” to describe female silence. Explains Krucker: “The Ancient Greek physicians believed that the openings of both a woman’s vagina and her mouth were connected. For example, a voice could telegraph the fact that a woman was menstruating, or that she had lost her virginity, and because of this vocal and sexual relationship, strict controls were put on women about when they could use their voices in society.”
Bartley and Krucker were particularly fascinated by the ololyga, a piercing female outcry that represents either intense pleasure or intense pain, and which had its roots in the Goddess worship that preceded the Greek patriarchy. “Women were forbidden to perform the ololyga within city walls,” explains Krucker. “This special sound was only permitted at regulated female rituals outside the city gates.

“‘Visceral’ is a word that comes to mind when the subject is Fides Krucker. So is “sensual.” Reviewers of Krucker’s singing performances have often noted her range of primal sounds and bizarre utterances, forms of expression that seem to have their source in parts of the body way beyond the voice box.”

“The acclaimed mezzo-soprano is one of Canada’s foremost divas of contemporary music, revered for her gutsy experimentation, both vocally and emotionally.”

Paula Citron, The Globe and Mail

“Vivid Vocalizing”
Now Magazine

yours to break

A cabin in the woods becomes an arena for intimacy and instinct. Through movement, popular song, boxing and words from Helen Humphrey’s Wild Dogs, a couple reveals
just how dangerous love can be.

“In Yours to Break, writer Fides Krucker and co-creator Dan Wild play two lovers in your typical tumultuous relationship: they meet, fall in love, sing some Hank Williams and then beat the shit out of each other. The show’s imaginative use of popular song, impassioned boxing matches and recitations of Helen Humphreys’ novel Wild Dogs are often effective. The actors’ intense sparring provides a striking visual representation of the characters’ chaotic mindsets. The show succeeds as an imaginative, entertaining and thoroughly professional production.”
EYE Magazine

“Had Allen Ginsberg not claimed the title for eternity, Howl might have made the best header for Fides Krucker’s narrative, a sustained wail of the untamed heart. …
Twelve hurting songs anchor the emotion of the piece and form a storyline, as a man and a woman ponder their beginning, their agony, their ecstasy and possibly their end, in the wake of a tragic loss…
Krucker responds with Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart,” taking the action into a carnal zone with a rawness that exceeds even Joplin’s.”
Susan Walker, Toronto Star

“this bouquet of songs proves monstrously powerful, particularly when they’re served up by Krucker, her voice as thick and rich as aged honey.”
John Coulbourn, Toronto Sun

“By keeping everything in flux, the show coaxes us into a layer of existence beyond our daily, habitual ways of relating to the world. In this layer we let go of our judgments and settle into a space ruled by the fragility, resilience and wild pathos of the human heart. What might have been construed, summarily, as an abusive or co-dependent relationship is thrown into a spin by the fluidity of gender roles. The man—while clearly the stronger physically—shows moments of supreme tenderness and vulnerability. The woman sings the angst of every woman who is forever seeking greater intimacy with her mate. And yet—even as she is overpowered and takes a good beating—defies the stereotype of abused woman as victim, thus transporting us to the depths of human longing where the face of our innermost desires is finally revealed.”
Niloo Hodjati
Mathematics Professor, OCAD, novelist

“Thanks again for the wonderful Yours to Break. The performance confirms again for me that you have become one of Canada’s most original and valuable artists. It was as if the piece resumed all that you do the best: singing and vocal daring of course, but also so many other things – creating and producing extremely provocative and cutting-edge work, bringing together some of the world’s best artists, and above all revealing your life to your audience through your art. It is this truth to yourself and your life that makes your work so transformative, enriching and compelling. The piece has stayed with me in the days since I saw it, and inspired my own thoughts and feelings in a way that few pieces do.”
Richard Armstrong
Vocal Teacher
Roy Hart Theatre, NYU, Banff Centre

“It was exquisite, and haunting. I keep thinking of the two of you up there as frozen music, as sculpture, but the dynamism of the pas de deux also leads me to other places, and to other stage works like La Ronde, or to some of the early works of Hrant Alianak..”
Karen Mulhallen
Editor-in-chief, Descant Magazine

“You challenged yourself with incredible courage for a raw authentic experience of how deeply we fall and crash into each other with bodies, arming our souls for a glimpse of truth and the ecstatic essence of life force creation.”
Anne Bourne
Composer & Performer

“Yours to Break is a remarkable tour de force by two skilled performers who synthesize their disparate performance vocabularies into a mesmerizing work of art. My students returned from seeing the performance full of epiphanies about the relationship between their technical training as singers and actors and the expression of a passionate heart. The production is deeply moving – it is also unbelievably skilled. I have never seen (or heard) a singer not only fill the space (from any position whatsoever) but also rip the walls down and scream her pain into the universe. And what mad courage allows Fides Krucker and Dan Wild to actually box each other – no punches pulled?! They walk an edge as performers that many of us aspire to but never reach. But they also demonstrate the extent to which the combination of technique and passion can take us, never safely but with confidence. It is an amazing performance.”
Diana Belshaw
Director, Theatre Performance program
Humber College

“I loved the way the songs moved out of dialogue and then slowly crept into ones’ conscious recognition, became their own thing, sometimes for only a few bars and then retreated as the meaning again became supreme. Beautiful.
You are mesmerizing on the stage.”
Mary Newberry
Managing Editor, Descant Magazine

“I thought the show was really good. You were amazing. I really liked the production. I liked your added storyline. Everything felt deeper and more resonant.”
Helen Humphreys
Author, Wild Dogs

“In Yours to Break, Krucker drapes the space with her voice cloaking the audience in a personal and private embrace. Her sensuality pours over the stage and draws out a deep and shared sense of tension and isolation from the theatre-goers and perhaps from the space itself.”
Andrea Donaldson
Writer, Director and Actor

“The love you explore is profound. Both you and Danny are so touchingly human and without the bullshit. Your voice dug inside my belly and I couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t want to lose it long after. Your love and humanity sear through, the sensuality, the vulnerability, the rage the passion goddamn it, I wanted to scream at the end of the show but could only let out a few miserly whoops. You stunned the audience, if we can only stammer at the end it is only because you knocked us out. K.O.”
Bogos Kalemkiar
Saw the show yesterday. Wow. I wanted to tell you how magical and amazing it was.. Such strong work. Such stunning visuals.
Yvette Nolan
Artistic Director, Native Earth Theatre

“Thank you for an incredibly crafted and passionate piece of work. I was struck by how every single component, from video to music to movement to text to lighting–worked towards the heart of the show. The performance gave me much to chew on as an artist, a performer and as a lover and mother.”
Deanna Yerinchuk
OISE graduate student

“Thank you for the incredibly beautiful, harrowing piece you have put together…it took me so many places, some very deep and secret and dark and others positively gleeful. La vie! L’amour! Aagggh!!”
Sheila Chevalier
General public

“Yours to Break is evocative of pain and joy, transparently woven together… Fides’ voice transcends all emotions.”
Marie-Héléne Fontaine
actress and visual artist

“…a work of beauty and passion, which transcended some of the limitations of the theatre to infiltrate the deepest thoughts and beliefs of the audience.”
Alon Nashman
actor and writer

“I feel art should touch the soul. I feel deeply touched. The very thing which is killing you is the very thing which tells you how alive you are. Thank you for your sensitivity and creativity.”
Murray Keith
General Public

“At times you feel you simply cannot watch – but you are compelled – heartbreakingly honest – relationship in vivisection.”
Soozi Schlanger
Visual artist and lead singer for Swamperella

“Thank you for an exquisite and brave performance. Being in the presence of such••unedited••and pure emotional vulnerability is freeing….”
Janet Beauchamp
Performer

cp salon

It’s about Love.
It’s about Cerebral Palsy.
It’s about A MAN with a disability

Singer/storyteller Kazumi Tsuruoka is joined by pianist Tania Gill: through rhythm and blues they tell the love story of a man with cerebral palsy. The 50-minute music-driven piece, produced and directed by Fides Krucker of Good Hair Day Productions, premiered in Toronto and has toured to Vancouver, Regina and Whitehorse.

What is performance?
What is disability?
What is embodiment?

CP Salon toured three Toronto post-secondary institutions through Fall 2009: Humber College, York University, and Ryerson University. The performance was followed by a panel discussion and break out conversations examining how our perception of disability and of performance can be transformed through sharing our gifts, challenges and experience with one another.

This tour was funded by the Toronto Arts Council, privately, and with the support of Picasso PRO/Creative Trust who are collaborating on the research aspects of the project and the panel discussions.

Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?” (Gabrielle Roy, on the Canadian 20 dollar bill)

The songs were vessels carrying the hidden joys and sorrows of the creative act itself…a hurricane of emotion brought with the greatest love imaginable and placed aurally in our hearts and hands. It was unlike anything I’d known.
Layne Coleman

We are rarely given the opportunity to see art that is created from such a place of profound truth, that combines exquisite skill, raw emotion and both passion and humour. The music is searing and hooks deep into the hearts of the audience, both embracing us and bringing us nose to nose with our own preconceptions and prejudices. It creates an emotional and intellectual journey that demands and engages in equal part.”
Diana Belshaw

…as dramatically striking as it was emotionally powerful. The most gorgeous moment? Tsuruoka and Oore jamming on the piano, their warmth, chemistry and joy lighting up the room.
Jon Kaplan, NOW Magazine. [2005,Toronto premiere]

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