Festival de la voix returns for ninth season


Voix Festival runs from March 19 to April 10

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This year Vox Aeterna’s Festival de la Voix returns just as spring is about to begin. Opening on March 19, after a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, long-empty concert halls, churches and studios will once again be filled with the sound of the human voice during the concerts and workshops planned for this year’s festival .

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Vox Aeterna, the West Island organization that oversees the three-week festival, has planned seven concerts celebrating a diversity of musical genres and four workshops for voice students.

“It’s like a gift … especially now after the pandemic when so much time was spent waiting for something to happen,” said Eda Holmes, artistic and executive director of Centaur Theatre, who will be leading a workshop for singers called Acting and Physicalizing Text.

For this dancer turned theater director, working with singers “is a privilege”. After a career as a soloist with San Francisco Ballet, Dutch National Ballet and William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet, Holmes turned towards theater and attended Montreal’s National Theater School in the directing program.

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“NTS gave me this wonderful education around storytelling and narrative,” explained Holmes.

Her new-found passion for telling stories lead her to directing and being the associate director at the Shaw Festival before returning to Montreal to become the artistic and executive director of Centaur in 2017. While at the Shaw her musicality and physicality found their way into several musicals and plays that drew widespread critical acclaim. Her work with various opera companies including Calgary Opera, the Opera Theater of St. Louis, and most recently as the director of the McGill Chamber Orchestra’s concert version of Carmen, speak to her continuing love of finding ways to help performers discover authenticity and depth of meaning in the texts they are working with.

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“Like many retired dancers, we maintain a kind of relationship to the expressive capacity of our own bodies…and this certainly manifests in everything I do,” said Holmes.

The workshop she will be leading is on Saturday, March 26, from 1 to 4 pm at St. Columba-by-the-Lake Church in Pointe-Claire.

“Your voice comes out of your whole body not just your mind or your face,” explained Holmes. “I am going to focus on… how text and music come together…I want to give people a chance to work organically with their bodies…so that they can take a piece of music and then find ways to unearth the song.”

With this spring’s gradual opening of concert halls, theaters and performance venues, singers like the many performers who will be part of Festival de la Voix, are once again beginning to be able to do what they love to do — sing for audiences.

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“It’s why we all do what we do. It is to communicate with the audience,” said Holmes as she reflected upon Centaur’s own re-opening.

This year marks the Festival de la Voix’s ninth season and the waiting is finally over for performers and audiences alike. Founded in 2012 by soprano, singer-songwriter, and voice teacher Kerry-Anne Kutz, along with Sonia Castiglione and Sheila Faour-Warren, the festival highlights a wide-range of vocal styles, and this year there will be concerts by artists including Ensemble Obiora promotes musicians from different cultural backgrounds and little-known composers of color, the Choeur de chambre du Québec, the IMANI Gospel Singers, Ranee Lee and her orchestra and the Ste-Anne Singers, an a cappella ensemble.

The series of concerts will take place at predominantly West-Island locations including two in Pointe-Claire, two in Dorval, one in each of Beaconsfield and Hudson, and a final one at the Unitarian Church of Montreal in Notre-Dame-de-Grace .

The Voix Festival 2022 runs from March 19 to April 10.

For more information, visit festivaldelavoix.com or www.facebook.com/festivaldelavoixmtl.

The Imani Gospel Singers will perform on March 26 at St. Columba-by-the-Lake Church in Pointe-Claire.
The Imani Gospel Singers will perform on March 26 at St. Columba-by-the-Lake Church in Pointe-Claire. jpg

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