Broken Chord program

Broken Chord

Gregory Maqoma Industries

Gregory Maqoma and Thuthuka Sibisi

March 9-11, 2023

Photo credit: Moeletsi Mabe

St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts Bluma Appel Theatre

TO Live would like to acknowledge Tkaronto, which is a Mohawk word meaning the place in the water where the trees are standing.

We live and work on the traditional territory of Haudenosaunee-speaking nations, including the Huron-Wendat, Seneca, and Mohawk. Haudenosauneespeaking nations have been here since time immemorial, and were more recently joined by the Mississaugas of the Credit.

This place has many Indigenous ports, including where the Humber and Rouge rivers meet other waterways such as Lake Ontario. Ancient longhouses— typical Haudenosaunee housing structures—have been found along both these rivers and in the north of Toronto near modern-day York University. This territory is covered by the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) Confederacy and the Anishnaabe (Ojibwe) and allied nations to peaceably share and care for the lands and the relationships around the Great Lakes.

What this means is that by living and working here, we all have a responsibility to the environment and to each other, to treat each other and the environment with peace and respect. This means we have responsibilities to honour, renew, and consistently uphold the values and relationships outlined in the ancient agreements.

Today, Toronto is home to Indigenous peoples and settlers from around the world. Let us all come together in an atmosphere of respect and peace to do good work together with good minds. Let’s start building stronger and healthier relationships with each other and the spaces we inhabit in Tkaronto, Ontari:io, Kanata.

Let’s hold our minds together in kindness. Nia:wen. Thank you.

© Dawn Maracle

Photo credit: Mark Gambino

Illustration credit: Gerda Boateng

Welcome letter from TO Live

Over 130 years ago, from 1891 to 1893, a group of young South African singers, The African (Native) Choir, travelled by boat to perform in Britain, Canada, and the United States. Tonight, you will see their story brought to life on stage with searing beauty, power, and emotional impact.

Internationally acclaimed dancer, choreographer, and performer Gregory Maqoma joined forces with composer and musical director Thuthuka Sibisi to create Broken Chord, which was inspired by only a handful of photographs from the historic tour.

As you will witness, the work interweaves the worlds of music and dance to bring the choir’s story to the stage, creating an extraordinary and important critique of urgent issues of migration, dispossession, and borders while further questioning the relationship between the colonized and the colonizers.

Maqoma and a quartet of vocalists from South Africa are joined on stage by That Choir, one of Toronto’s and Canada's most exciting a cappella ensembles. This collaboration is an illustration of TO Live’s focus this season on bringing together local and international performers to further promote the exchange of ideas and artistic dialogue afforded by TO Live Presents international touring program.

This can be experienced again with Stephanie Lake Company’s Colossus, and Volcano’s production of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha, co-presented by TO Live and Luminato Festival Toronto.

Broken Chord is a significant and deeply affecting production and we are proud to be sharing it with you this evening.

Clyde Wagner President & CEO

Josephine Ridge Vice President, Programming

A note from Gregory Maqoma and Thuthuka Sibisi

Between 1891 to 1893 a group of young African singers travelled by boat to Britain, Canada, and America. This ensemble of the missionary-educated Black elite, named The African (Native) Choir, were on a mission to raise funds for a technical school in Kimberley, South Africa. Using traditional Xhosa and contemporary dance styles alongside atmospheric soundscapes, we weave together recorded personal accounts of The African Choir, revealing a drama of truly global dimensions, while simultaneously looking at the Black body as a political site. Further, we question the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer, and either’s complicity in shaping and shifting a South African narrative—past and present. Broken Chord not only reflects on an archive but looks to trigger, critique, and comment on urgent issues of migration, dispossession, borders, and paths of forced closure—a deliberate and disturbing gesture on the part of the West against the other.

We come from, and have been taught in, a music and movement tradition that stipulates itself according to this binary of the West versus the other. What then comes to the fore is how the West concretely safeguards itself and its boundaries. We want to disrupt this positioning by planting ourselves at the centre of this dichotomy thus becoming the friction that can summon, envision, and engender a newer, more original conversation concerned with sonicgestured worlds: who do we write these worlds for; whose stories are we to tell through these movements, sounds, and text practices? Ultimately, this work serves as a deliberate and fiercely subjective act of self-beatification.

In this work we focus on the voice not only as a bearer of loss, hope, wisdom, and affection but also as an instrument of witnessing—of seeing and remembering. What makes this work unique is the origin of the musical material - renderings and sketches adopted from a meagre and faint program of songs. From this arises a severe provocation, encouraging a want to dance, dart, ripple, and rip apart; a desire to dive deep and far into imagining what these songs looked, tasted, sounded, and felt like. Central to this we find our instigator; the messenger, the saviour, the destructor, the disembodied figure of a broken past.

Sibisi Concept, Composer, and Musical Director

Grogory Maqoma

Concept and Choreographer

Thuthuka

Broken Chord

Gregory Maqoma Industries

Creative team

Concept and choreographer:

Gregory Maqoma

Concept, composer, and musical director: Thuthuka Sibisi

Dramaturg: Shanell Winlock

Technical design: Oliver Hauser

Technical director: Ralf Nonn

Sound design: Nthuthuko Mbuyazi

Costume design:

Maxhosa by Laduma Ngxokolo

Cast

Gregory Maqoma

Tshegofatso Khunwane

Lubabalo Velebhayi

Xolisile Bongwana

Zandile Hlatshwayo

That Choir

Production

Executive producer:

Gregory Maqoma Industries

Co-producers: Festival Grec – Barcelona, Manchester International Festival, Théâtre de la Ville – Paris, Weimar Arts Festival (National Theater), Festpielhaus St Pölten, Torinodanza Festival / Teatro Stabile di Torino - Teatro Nazionale, Festival Aperto, Fondazione I Teatri – Reggio Emilia, Stanford Live at Stanford University, Sadler’s Wells

Production manager: Siyandiswa Dokoda

Assistant to composer: Mhlaba Buthelezi

Movement understudy: Katleho Lekhula

Wardrobe assistant: Nathi Mnisi

Special thanks to the Market Theatre Foundation, Tshwane University of Technology Performing Arts (Vocal Arts) and Carlos Cansino Pérez.

Gregory Maqoma Concept and choreographer

Gregory Vuyani Maqoma became interested in dance in the late 1980s as a means to escape the growing political tensions growing in Soweto, South Africa, where he was born. He started his formal dance training in 1990 at Moving into Dance, where he later became the associate artistic director in 2002. He founded Vuyani Dance Theatre (VDT) in 1999 while undertaking a scholarship at the Performing Arts Research and Training School (PARTS) in Belgium, under the direction of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. Maqoma has established himself as an internationally renowned dancer, choreographer, teacher, and director.

In 2002, Maqoma received the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for dance and was a finalist in the Daimler Chrysler Choreography Award. He was a finalist in the Rolex Mentorship Programme in 2003. Several works in his repertoire have won him accolades and international acclaim, including the Tunkie Award for leadership in dance (2012), and a “Bessie,” New York City’s premier dance award for Exit/Exist for original music composition (2014). He served as a nominator in the 2016-2017 Rolex Arts Initiative and curated the 2017 main dance program for the National Arts Festival.

The French government honoured Maqoma with the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres (Knight of the Arts & Literature)

Award in 2017. The following year, Maqoma collaborated with William Kentridge as a choreographer and performer in The Head and the Load, an opera that premiered at the Tate Modern Gallery in London and is still touring Europe and the United States.

Maqoma collaborated with Idris Elba and Kwame Kwei-Armah in the production Tree, produced by Manchester International Festival and the Young Vic (2018). In 2020, Maqoma was honoured to deliver the prestigious International Dance Day message under the auspices of the International Theatre Institute and UNESCO.

Recently he was commissioned by Ballet De Lyon to create The Valley of Human Sounds and Ballet Black to create Black Sun. Maqoma wrote and directed his first musical, Third World Express, in 2022 in collaboration with Shadrack Bokaba. The musical premiered at the Mandela at Joburg Theatre. Shortly after he choreographed for another new musical, Mandela, directed by Schele Williams with music created by Greg and Shaun Borowsky produced by the Young Vic in London. ZO!Mute, a new double with Vincent Mantsoe, premiered at the Lesedi at Joburg Theatre in February 2023. Maqoma celebrates his 50th birthday in 2023 and has curated many legacy projects that he will be revealing as the year progresses.

Thuthuka Sibisi

Concept, composer, and musical director

Thuthuka Sibisi’s musical education began at the world-renowned Drakensberg Boy’s Choir School where his passion for performance was born. He subsequently went on to graduate with a bachelor of music at Stellenbosch University in 2011. He is a graduate of the MA (performance making) program at Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom.

Thuthuka has toured extensively, performing throughout South Africa as well as Asia and South America. Further tours include Stockholm, as musical director of Philip Miller’s opera Between A Rock and A Hard Place in collaboration with Cape Town Opera. Further, he was associate conductor and chorus master for Bongani Ndonana-Breen’s oratorio Credo, which was written to commemorate UNISA’s 140th anniversary of its founding. Other engagements include chorus master for UCT Opera School: Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. Visual collaborations include work with Johannesburgbased photographer and sculptor, Jake Singer, on Joburg City Hustle and Intersections To This City, presented at Sustainable Empires in Venice, Italy and Los Angeles Centre for Digital Art.

In China, he served as musical director to Philip Miller’s Pulling Numbers (premiere) and Ciné-Concert, presented as part of Notes Toward a Model Opera by William Kentridge. 2016 also saw Thuthuka make his Italian debut as music director for William Kentridge’s Triumphs and Laments to be presented in Rome, Italy. Further projects include a commission by Cape Town Opera for Musiquées Sacrée d’Afrique et d’Europe, in residence at Festival International d’Aix-en-Provence. He was also the musical director and co-composer alongside Philip Miller for William Kentridge’s The Head and The Load, which premiered in 2018 at London’s Tate Modern.

He is a recipient of the Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans 2017 Award and an 2018 Ampersand Foundation fellow.

That Choir

That Choir is one of Toronto’s most exciting professional a cappella ensembles, combining high-calibre performance with storytelling through choral music. Founded in 2008 by artistic director Craig Pike, That Choir now draws together close to 20 singers with diverse backgrounds. Each season, That Choir presents a three-concert series of contemporary choral works and undertakes a range of professional development projects.

That Choir has toured nationally, appearing at Canada’s national choral music festival, Podium; as featured guest artists at MusicFest Canada in Ottawa; and on provincial tours of Ontario and Newfoundland. They have received the Elmer Iseler Best Choir Award and placed first in both the OMFA Provincial Music Festival and FCMF National Music Festival. They have also performed as the feature choir in the Game of Thrones Live Concert Experience, Hans Zimmer Live on Tour, and The Legend of Zelda Symphony.

Honouring their mission to support Canadian talent and the works of emerging composers, the ensemble recently launched That Choir’s composer-in-residence program, most recently led by Matthew Emery. This workshop program is dedicated to the development of new choral compositions by emerging Canadian composers.

Choir

Tia Andriani

Rayna Crandlemire

Julia Frodyma

Jennifer Krabbe

Jordan Baldwin

Julia Barber

Olivia Pryce-Digby

Margaret Thompson

Rick Byun

Nick Gough

Robert Kinar

Nicholas Nicholaidis

Luke Marty

Joshua McFaul

Henry Paterson

Michael Robert-Broder

Want to learn more about The African Choir’s story?

Made up of members of different church choirs from around the Eastern Cape and surrounding areas, circa 1891 and 1893, a group of young African singers embarked on a tour of the U.K., the U.S., and Canada in hopes of raising funds for a school in Kimberley, South Africa. The choir went on to thrill audiences, playing to scores of people in large auditoriums. But their story has largely been out of the spotlight ever since. To learn more about The African Choir’s tours and members, some of which went on to become influential social activists, check out this video that dives into the historical records and photographic archives.

Photo credit: Dahlia Katz. Artwork credit: Lost in the Island

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