Opera: The Handmaid's Tale

Welcome!  It is my absolute pleasure to welcome you all back to another season of Opera at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. This summer sees a new collaboration and emergence of a new program called “Interplay”.  We are focusing on chamber music, chamber opera and experimenting.

To be open to change, to be receptive to challenges is what this program is about. We have welcomed participants from all over the world to come and experience creation at Banff Centre.

We offered positions to instrumentalists, singers, pianists, stage directors, arts writers, composers and librettists.  The reason is to foster collaboration and how we each need to rely on one another in how it relates to performance practice.

We supported these participants by providing a world class faculty to work with them on all the skills needed to not only survive but thrive in the world of arts in 2024.  

I believe strongly in the need to connect with our communities. We had over-capacity audiences at both our Opera Pub series at the Royal Canadian Legion #26 Colonel Moore Branch in Banff and held community concerts at Banff Centre in varying formations.  

Our programming/training this summer focused on creation and working with living composers.  

We’re presenting a work-in-progress based on Margaret Atwood’s sobering The Handmaid’s Tale.  This opera was written by Poul Ruders, but we have commissioned composer Daniel Scholsberg to arrange the work for chamber ensemble using different technologies to evoke Gilead.  The hope is for this arrangement to be used by more arts companies across the globe.

Opera at Banff Centre will continue to thrust forward, while acknowledging and building on the foundations of the past.  

Finally, I would like to thank the team here at Banff Centre for providing the support needed for us to achieve the success we are all striving for. They allow us to dream bigger and accomplish more.  

Sincerely,

Joel Ivany 
Artistic Director, Opera 

The Handmaid’s Tale

Music by Poul Ruders

Original English Libretto by Paul Bentley

Based on the novel by Margaret Atwood

This house program highlights the faculty and performers for The Handmaid's Tale. See the full list of Faculty and Participants in this years' INTERPLAY program.

In the far future, the year 2195, a box containing a number of audio cassettes from the beginning of the 21st Century suddenly appear, and the tapes are subsequently played at an International Historical Convention in Cambridge, England.
The tapes contain the secret diary of an anonymous woman who allegedly escaped from her position as involuntary, so-called Handmaid, at a private home in the theocratic dictatorship of the republic Gilead, the former USA, around A.D. 2006. We don’t know the Handmaid’s real name - only her given name of service: Offred.

Banff Centre is grateful to the following supporters for making this program possible: David Spencer Emerging Vocalists Endowment, the Yolande Freeze Master Artists in Music Fund, the Music in PyeongChang and Banff Centre Partnership as well as the Government of Alberta, the Government of Canada, and the Canada Council for the Arts.