Productions /

Luminato Festival (Song of Extinction)

When Toronto’s annual, weeklong Luminato Festival began in 2007, the idea was to bring major contemporary performance works of music, dance, and other visual arts to Canada, commission ambitious new works by Canadians, and put the city on the global cultural map.

In celebration of the festival’s 10th anniversary, musicinthebarns was invited to produce a multimedia work. We were particularly intrigued by the challenge of staging the performance at the Hearn Generating Station, the festival’s main performance venue, a long-abandoned, massive 400,000 square-foot brick power plant temporarily opened to the public as an impromptu performance space of dilapidated epic grandeur.

To convey the long view of environmental damage and its exponential progression since human civilization began—as both a lyric requiem and an urgent call to action, “Song of Extinction,” combined a fifty-minute silent film montage by documentary director Marc deGuerre, a cycle of fifteen poems written as a libretto by Canadian poet Don McKay, and an elaborate musical setting by composer Rose Bolton—composed of recorded electronic music tracks, and a score for two choirs, a pair of electric keyboards, and the musicinthebarns ensemble.