By STACY LEE KONG

I would not describe myself as an opera person. In fact, until recently, I was much more likely to think of What’s Opera Doc, the 1957 Looney Tunes short, or maybe Carmen: A Hip Hopera, the 2001 TV movie (billed as an “urban retelling” of the classic opera, it Beyoncé, Mos Def, Wyclef Jean, Mekhi Phifer, Da Brat, Jermaine Dupri and Lil' Bow Wow, among other 2001 hip-hop heavyweights) than any actual operas. But in 2022, I interviewed American opera singer J’Nai Bridges for the Globe and Mail, and our conversation changed the way I think about this art form. I was especially interested in what she had to say about whether Black and racialized audiences felt welcome in the world of opera—and why they deserved to. So, when I heard about the Canadian Opera Company’s upcoming staging of Aportia Chryptych: A Black Opera for Portia White, I knew I wanted to interview someone involved in the production. Lucky for me, that person was Neema Bickersteth, a soprano/artist/maker who both performs in Aportia Chryptych and acted as the dramaturg. Bickersteth and I chatted recently about Black operas, claiming space and why more people need to know who Portia White was, and why she mattered in Canadian musical history. Read on for our conversation!

How did you become involved in this project?

Haui, who is the creator of the entire piece, was gathering the team. He and [composer] Sean [Mayes] already knew they were going to work together and they wanted a third voice. Haui had already written the libretto, which was the text, and then on the path of finding the music to go with the words, he wanted to have a team in place, as opposed to the usual system of writing the piece and then passing it over to the composer and then the composer looking it over by themselves. I think he was interested in finding new ways of approaching this form.

They're both Black men, and I think it was just to make sure we were all on the right track by having a Black woman in the space. Plus, a trinity is central to the piece, and Haui wanted to mimic that in the creation process.

And what was the attraction for you?

I've never been on the other side of the table like that. I've been involved in lots of processes, but my role was always on the stage, helping the creative team fulfill their vision. So, I felt very inexperienced. But Haui was like, “It's not really like a dramaturg in the sense that people might think—let's just be together, chat together, go through the texts together, discuss the topics, and see what comes up.”

Okay, so speaking of the role of dramaturg, what does that mean, exactly? Because I Googled, but…

So, it changes depending on the people and the art form, but it's the person that helps the story, the person that researches to help the story. A dramaturg is a position of support for the making of the story. Often, it is really about the text and making sure that the text makes sense, is clear and is functioning in the best way. But in this case, the texts had already been written, and that’s not my expertise, anyway. I'm a performer and I've done a lot of new work, and new creations, so I had unusual skills to bring to the table. My perspective was more about the flow, and also because I like new work and experimenting, I'm interested in trying new things and seeing what happens. Whereas a traditional person might want to make sure something fits into the box properly, I'm interested in exploring how it doesn’t fit into the box and seeing if we can make a story flow without trying to make it. 

Do you feel like you did that?

The catch is that I'm also a performer in the show. Quite early on, I was like, “I'm not good at wearing many hats.” There's an expectation that everyone can do it just because we are all just… doing it. But I was pretty clear that at a certain point, I was not going to be doing a good job as a dramaturg and that I would switch and become a performer, and so that happened over this year. But that dovetails with where all of the other creators are coming in. So this past year, they started working with the designers, and costume and the dramaturgy of all of the design, because Haui is a designer. So, the point was that he could do that and I could focus more on the performance aspect. 

This makes me realize that I don’t know how long the development process is for an opera. When did you start working on this? 

I joined in 2021. It takes a long time to make a show, and it takes a long time to make an opera. We weren’t working every day, because we all had other things happening during those years. But we would get together when we could. We’d get far enough [in the creation process], and then it was time for music to start being composed, so they would go and do that. Then we would meet up again the next year when there was more music to talk about. We also had workshops in between as well, so it was a touch, then go back to your other stuff, then touch on it again, let it breathe and then work on it more. 

There are so many people involved. We kept stacking people, too. It starts with one person with their idea of working with whoever, and then you add the composer and then you add the dramaturgy support, and then try it out with some singers, and then we have a designer and lighting. Everything has its own life, so the story that the costumes tell, the story that the set tells, and the story that the lighting tells all come together to tell a single story.

Switching gears a little bit to talk about the opera itself, I did not know anything about Portia White before getting the COC press release for this show. So, I’m curious—did you know about her before? 

No. I think she was on a stamp that was released [in 1999]. When Haui approached me, I learned that she was a Black Canadian classical singer that nobody knows about. She was famous in her time, but as usual, she was forgotten. But how come I didn't learn about her in school? I have two degrees in music—how did that never come up? 

What do you think people should know about her?

She was a classical singer, a contralto. She was a Black Nova Scotian from a big family with a father who was a pastor known for being in the army. She gained international fame with a giant, powerful, beautiful sound, but at some point, she stopped singing and became a teacher in Toronto, at Branksome Hall, which is a private school. She was one of the music teachers there for quite a number of years. Towards the end of her life, she sang for the queen, who came to PEI. And she was glorious in her time, and it feels so important to remember her.

I started taking singing lessons when I was a kid and [Black American contralto] Marian Anderson was always one of the names that would come up, and I completely didn't know that there was someone closer to home, closer to my experience, just in the fact that she was Canadian. So yes, it is really special to get to know her. She is now part of my legacy as a Black classical Canadian singer—I'm happy to have met her in some sense and I’m honoured to tell some of her stories.

What can people expect from Aportia Chryptych? How is it similar to, and different from, a traditional opera experience? 

I guess it's similar in the sense that there are singers on a stage and an orchestra. But it's definitely a new opera, so that means anything goes nowadays. We have songs that Portia sang. We sing some of them in arrangements, and then there are also many different genres that we cover as a way of bringing her into now. We go into the past to where she was, but we also bring her into the now. It’s not the story of her life from birth to death, it's from a creative lens, through which we are looking at parts of her life and what it could have been if she was alive today. They had me rapping and doing spoken word as well. We also see classical pieces, arias and classical songs that she sang in her lifetime. She sang a giant spectrum of classical music, and we're doing that as well.

The other interesting thing is that it takes place in the last breath of life and instead of having one person play Portia, there are three of us, so it's like she has an inner struggle and to pass on to what's next she has to grapple with her whole life. She fractures into three—body [played by Bickersteth], soul [played by Sate] and spirit [played by Adrienne Danrich]—and goes through the journey of her life, looking at it critically, joyfully and with sadness . She goes through many emotions, but also looks at her life as if it were present looking back with the past and the future. 

How does this fit into the tradition of Black opera? And actually, what does a Black opera even mean? 

I think that it’s about claiming space in a place where we didn't have very much space, claiming it for Portia. There's just not a lot of space in classical music to do this kind of concert—like, a Black space, which is a space of safety. And in that safety, you can look at the tough things.

It sounds like when you're talking about the creation of a Black opera, you’re talking about creating somewhere where it's safe to delve into hard things, and to think about those things that are thorny, or complicated or contradictory.

Yeah. And there's so much contradiction.

This is not exactly the same thing, but it also feels like making a Black opera allows you, as creative people and artists, to make a space that opens up storytelling possibilities. I’m not sure that traditional opera experiences speak to me in the way that the spoken word or hip-hop speaks to me, for example. So, an opera that brings in some things that feel a little bit more familiar, but also has that traditional element is compelling.

It's really great, especially because most of the population isn't super old. So when we're making things, it's to share it. And, the people making things nowadays are also not super old, so it's like, how do we put the art that I've learned and that my voice sings in, that I enjoy singing in, which is classical, with things in my modern-day life that my voice also enjoys, and my ears enjoy? I am the audience too, in a sense. And I don't love going to see the same old, same old opera. I want to feel something new, I want to be able to realize that inquiry that we're talking about. If artists don’t put anything new into it, then I'm gonna fall asleep. That doesn't mean that it has to be a new opera, but there needs to be something fresh inserted into the work. And in this case, it is a new work. There are a lot of different things being injected into this work that I think are just for people now, as opposed to ‘opera people.’

Oh, that’s interesting. My perception of these high culture spaces—opera, ballet, classical music—is that there’s not always have room for creativity. Like, tradition is so important that it supersedes interpretation.

And I know that these spaces are finding it harder to get an audience now. So, they're finally looking to shift, too. A show like this is a place where hopefully Black audiences and racialized audiences and people who want to learn about a Canadian historical figure can all come check it out.

Aportia Chryptych: A Black Opera for Portia White ran from June 14 to 16 at the Canadian Opera Company. It was also live-streamed on June 15 at 2 p.m.

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