Hi from PEI.
We’ve settled here over the past week or so, for our usual (first time in 2 years!) summer work at the Charlottetown Festival and I’m beginning to decompress from a challenging year.
Challenging. And rewarding too, of course.
Here’s a little point form report of the year for you all:
Concerts: We presented 6 concerts.
Augmented Celli: October. With Nicola Baroni and me. We first toured to Toronto and Kitchener, playing at U of Toronto and NUMUS, and interesting with students. We also played a Halifax concert at the "one time only" venue The Cobb Lobby.
Karen Ng: November. With Geordie Haley and Andrew Jackson. What a perfect concert of free music! Expressive, focussed and fun!
The Seeds Project: December. The culmination of a project which began in May 2021, with shared recorded tracks creating duos. The groups of 4 met in three podcast episodes on New Musings on New Music. Finally the December concert brought all 12 musicians together to play in 3 quarets.
Constellations: March. An attempt to release Constellations a new CD by Chimera (François Houle, Norm Adams and Tim Crofts) stymied by COVID -19! François was unable to play but Tim and Norm were joined by stalwart Haligonians Geordie Halyard Andrew MacKelvie. Check out the recording on Afterday Audio's Bandcamp page!
NYX and Strata: April. Another show altered, this time by travel troubles for 2 of NYX. Isabelle Duthoit managed to get here and shared the concert with Strata (Brandon Auger and Norm Adams). They exchanged sets, solo, duo and and finally joining in a trio with Strata.
SlowPitch Sound: A great collaboration between SlowPitch Sound and Tim Crofts and Doug Cameron. The music blended freedom with rhythm in perfect measures.
Outreach: We began the SLAB (soundLAB: Audio for Youth) in early April, and ran 12 sessions at Radstrom, which attracted 2 to 3 participants each. Rebecca Fairless and Hassan Munir led the sessions. This is a great start to what we hope will be a continuing project.
Artists-in-Residence: We had 2 Artists-In-Residence: Robin Servant in December and Roxanne Nesbitt in May. Robin was handicapped by a COVID lockdown, the moment he arrived, but Roxanne’s impact on the Halifax community was great! We had a showing at The Maritime Conservatory with a large group of people passing through to hear and discuss her work. We also visited the visionary blacksmithing couple John and Nancy Little in East Dover, thanks to them for a great afternoon!
Improv Kitchen: Geordie Haley led 6 sessions at Radstorm. Things were really starting to build as spring came, with some great new participants and always interesting music.
New Musings on New Music: This is project is still really ongoing, as we have released 14 episodes, with 2 more to record for the season. These conversations with creative music creators and practitioners are a really fun and interesting! Take a listen!
Jessica Lowe: Jess has served as sL administrator for the past 3 or so years, has moved to new challenges! I loved working with Jess. We had great communication and she patiently talked me through quite a few challenges, this season especially! We all wish her the best as she continues her work as a dancer and choreographer and owner of Illusion Dance Arts in Dartmouth! Thank you Jess.
We are launching an open call for applications to an expanded Administrative position.
Conclusions: It was a pretty intense year (to put it mildly)! COVID sort of snuck up on us after a very productive first year., where we reinvented as we went and created a lot of work and bits of employment for all kinds of artists. The concerts were all great as always and the courage of our musicians and audiences to show up at concerts and other activity was great. Thanks to all of you!
This season left a bit of a mark on me. COVID became tough as we arts organizations contracted, expanded and contracted our programming. The workload and quick shifts were exhausting, but the music we brought to life made it all worthwhile!
Thanks to all of our supporters: Arts Nova Scotia, The Canada Council for the Arts, Halifax, our supporters (you know who you are). Thank you all!
Wait til you see and hear next year! You're going to love it.
Bring on 2022/23!
Norm
