Productions /
The Great Hall
An invitation from Canada’s principal academic association for the study of theatre history to participate in their annual three-day conference in Toronto in 2017—Performing the Anthropocene: Setting the Stage for the End of the World—provided the occasion for one of musicinthebarns’ most ambitious multi-media projects.
Constructed around John Cage’s bleakly prescient 1976 work about fossil fuel, Lecture on the Weather, we invited violinist Dana Lyn and guitarist Kyle Sanna to perform from their 2015 album, The Great Arc, and anthropologist Natasha Myers and filmmaker Ayelen Liberona (both trained as dancers) to present their long-running project Becoming Sensor, a mesmerizing multi-screen installation focusing on Toronto’s very last surviving stand of oak trees in the city’s High Park.
Staged in two reception halls and the principal concert venue of The Great Hall—a palatial, four-story Victorian building, originally built as Toronto’s YMCA— our audience was encouraged to wander in whatever way they wished among the three performances.
