The Story: Joel Ivany on Against The Grain's new season

L-R Joel Ivany, Nancy Hitzig, Cecily Carver, Christopher Mokrzewski and Caitlin Coull

A Diary of One Who Appears
by Joel Ivany Artistic Director, Against the Grain Theatre

I’m an opera director. I often work with acting singers who are among the best in the world. This is an area of comfort for me. But budgeting, ticketing, licensing, website designing and dealing with agents are not skills I had as I emerged from opera school, but inevitably they come with the job of running your own theatre company.

Thankfully I have a wonderful team, which over the past year and a half has enabled Against the Grain Theatre to become what it is today.

We’re currently preparing our 2012/2013 season, and I’m constantly aware of how much thinking goes into every single decision. AtG is a unique ensemble that requires intimate venues to give our events that special je ne sais quoi. It takes time to scout out these niche locales and vet them for our unusual purposes. 

Janácek

However, more important are the artistic decisions that lead to a season’s worth of content we can be proud of. On March 1 and 2, 2013, we’re presenting a double bill song cycle of Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments and Janácek’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared. These are both song cycles that were built around meaningful and moving texts. Kafka Fragments is a rarely performed work written for soprano and violin with text coming from snippets of Kafka’s actual diaries. The Diary of One Who Disappeared is a beautiful song cycle written in Czech about a rich man falling in love with a Gypsy woman. Both of these song cycles played through my head as we found the perfect location, The Extension Room on Eastern Ave. Nancy Hitzig, our ineffable general manager, put us in touch with a dancer who also runs a dance studio just north of Toronto’s Distillery District. It’s a giant loft space that extends the mind and expands the voice – perfect for our March presentation. 

Speaking of Nancy: she is the captain who keeps the AtG ship on course. Her passion and energy is off the charts, and this allows each of us to soak up her motivation and translate it to our own tasks. The enthusiasm she brings spills over to the rest of the team as we prepare our season.

We have been so overwhelmed with the positive response our efforts have received. The goal for this year is to build upon what we achieved last season, harnessing that positivity and striving to be even better. Our Spring 2012 production of The Turn of the Screw was critically praised and really showed the world what we could do. Caitlin Coull, our Communications Director, made sure that everyone knew about what a powerful show we had on our hands. Caitlin has proven how invaluable it is to have someone with professional press experience and knowledge on board. She works her magic to let the city (and somehow beyond) know who we are and what we’re doing. It has elevated our expectations and caused us to re-think and dream bigger, which is important when announcing plans for the coming year.

Mozart

Our music director, Christopher Mokrzewski, is my right hand. (I’m left handed). He’s right there making key decisions and fighting to make the best artistic choices possible. Healthy discussions are great and when we disagree, it brings out why we disagree and then how will we solve this problem. We trust each other implicitly, which comes out of a solid friendship. When you’re allowed to dream up projects and have them realized, it brings an immense sense of pride. Both Topher and I strive for excellence. We are both working with the Canadian Opera Company and other top companies in North America and with that, we take the good that we see and apply it to AtG. I mean, who really decides to start a theatre/opera company in this economic climate? We did and we’re trying to make it work. Thankfully we’re young, ambitious and a bit crazy. 

This leads to our final project. We’ll be presenting a unique and new production of Le Nozze di Figaro. It will truly be unique, because we’re writing a brand new English libretto (sorry, nothing personal Da Ponte!) and we’ll set our story in contemporary Toronto. We don’t do this pretentiously; rather, it’s a way to connect with new audiences and experiment. We’re risking a lot on this production and expect it to be a way of seeing and hearing Figaro like you’ve never seen. 

When researching for Figaro’s Wedding (our version’s title) I found a unique arrangement of the opera written sometime in the early 1800s for string quartet. With iTunes not coming around for a few hundred years, people had no way of hearing new music being written. Two-piano arrangements and various other arrangements were written so that people could hear Mozart’s genius whenever they wanted. For me, this idea seemed too good to pass up. After contacting Harvard, we were able to obtain the music and will have a string quartet with our Music Director at the pianoforte. Audience members will experience all of this with beers in hand – what could be better? 

You hope when planning a season (and future seasons) that there is an arc to your design. Like reading music, you must always be thinking and looking ahead. You have to be considering the projects you would like to tackle, how they mesh with the others you have on the books, and whom you would like to work with. It’s important to dream, but we all know that one must be quite proficient in budgeting, grant writing, smiling and letter writing. Everyting we do takes funding, and we hope that our results are feeding the cultural souls of Toronto. Everything we do is for our audience, our city and our art form. This is why igniting the passionate minds in our community is of key importance.

Cecily Carver is our Community Engagement advisor. She joined due to her unbridled enthusiasm for opera. When smart people want to be a part of something exciting, you do everything you can do get them on board! Cecily is in touch with everything that is changing in the arts, and helps us stay connected to our audience. From lending thoughts on social media strategies to thinking of new ways of connecting with young patrons, she helps us to stay on top of our game.

When planning a season, you need to go with your gut. It led me to the amazing team of friends with whom I’m working at AtG, and I’m going to trust that it’s going to lead to a wonderful season of intimate, exciting, professional music and theatre.

@joelivany

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