Q & A with Neema Bickersteth and Gregory Oh

Neema Bickersteth is the creator and star of Century Song, seamlessly moving through the worlds created on stage by song, dance and art. She is accompanied on piano by Gregory Oh, who creates improvised soundscapes along with Debashis Sinha (percussion and computer). Here, Neema and Gregory reflect on the Century Song journey.

Neema Bickersteth

Gregory Oh

Q: What moment in the show always delights you/takes your breath away?

NB: Well, there are many moments that literally take my breath away leaving me a sweating, panting mess... but I love the very end of the show when I feel like I'm really a dancer moving in only light, no other visual distractions, just me in my body as myself.

GO: Delight: when Deb whips out his suitcase of toy instruments.

Breathtaking: City Kid visuals!

Q: What artist from the past century do you wish more people knew about?

NB: Kathleen Munn. We are using a work of hers from the 20's -  of a nude woman painted in the cubist style.  She was experimenting with styles that were very different than most of her peers in Canada at the time.

Composition (Horses), Kathleen Munn

GO: Gerard Grisey. Vortex Temporum is one of the greatest works in the entire 20th century canon. 

Q: Do you listen to music to get ready before the show? What music?

NB: Nope I don't listen to anything. We're making so much during the show, it's nice to have a bit of quiet.

GO: Never. Generally all I ever hear is Deb getting fanboy about buying 17 more Gigabytes of sound effect samples, but I don't really listen.

Q: This show’s been in development for 5 years. Have you ever done anything else that took five years?

NB: I don't think so but... I went to university for music for 7 years. I had 7 years of development/waiting before getting pregnant with my baby. Hmmm... now I'm interested in what will happen to Century Song after 7 years!  

GO: Wooing my current partner.

Q: Can you tell us about a surprising or memorable moment during the creation of Century Song?

NB: During the making of what we call the Orlando video - I was surprised at how good Momme looked in the afro wig!

OH: There was the time we arrived at the NAC Ontario Scene Festival, and I was warming up on the piano, and using all sorts of extended techniques inside and outside to play the instrument, and somehow the little vibrator I was exciting the treble strings with slipped out of my hands and under the strings and into the action. Vibrators don't turn themselves off, and the only way I could get it out was to remove the lid, unscrew the keyblock pins and remove the entire action. It took a long time. It felt even longer. The technical crew was not impressed.

Q: What moment from the past Century do you wish you’d been a witness to?

GO: The 1998 Rose Bowl. National Championship! Woodson!

Either that or Nam June Paik's "First Accident of the 21st Century".

Catch Neema and Gregory in Century Song, running January 19-23 as part of Progress. Tickets can be purchased here.

Q & A with Ross Manson

Volcano Artistic Director Ross Manson joined the team of Century Song as director in 2011 and has been keenly devoted to its growth and development ever since. In this post, Ross reflects on some of his favourite aspects of the show.

Ross sits at the piano during an early workshop of Century Song

Q: What moment in the show always delights you/takes your breath away?

A: Whenever Neema sings. Which is often. But her ability to sing the incredibly complex Aperghis vocalise while dancing the incredibly complex Alton choreography, for example, is breathtaking. Every time.

Q: What artist from the past century do you wish more people knew about?

A: Olivier Messiaen’s life story is enormously interesting. He had a happy life into which horror intruded - this would be in France and Poland before and during the Second World War. We have 2 compositions of his in the show - one from his happy pre-war period  when he was in love and working a lot (1930s), and another - called Vocalise for the Angel who Announces the End of Time, which is part of his Quartet for the End of Time (1941) - which he wrote in a Nazi POW camp, after his wife had gone mad and he had lost pretty much everything he held dear. The premiere of this piece was in the camp, with an audience of guards and prisoners in the outdoors in cold weather. There were only three other musician prisoners, and so the piece was written as a quartet for the instruments they happened to play. It is a towering piece of music in the 20th century. In our show, our arrangement of this music accompanies a series of images by German Expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz. It is a section that exemplifies what artists can show about the experience of war.

In addition, a large part of the work we did on the show was to look into the history of black women in Canada from the early 1900s to the present day - this to inform the emotional choices Neema makes while singing. There are MANY things in this history that I would guess the majority of Canadians know nothing about. There's the bulldozing of an entire thriving neighbourhood in 1970 in Vancouver (called Hogan’s Alley) to make way for a viaduct that was never actually built. The neighbourhood was mixed race, but predominantly black. Among the residents displaced was Nora Hendrix, the grandmother of Jimmy (who used to visit his grandmother in Vancouver as a child). There’s also the community of black farmers who moved to Alberta from Oklahoma in the early 1900s. They were answering a Canadian government ad campaign inviting American farmers to Alberta. The new black arrivals were not what was expected and were so unwelcome that the government of Canada began another marketing campaign in the USA - this one to discourage black immigration. There’s also the fact that black women working in munitions factories during the 2nd World War were often given the most dangerous jobs, and paid the least. But there’s also the jazz scene in Montreal though the 30s and 40s - the only major North American city at the time where white and black musicians were allowed to share the stage. And then there’s the rise of black women’s feminism in the 1970s - a powerful and articulate movement calling not only for liberation, but for justice. Black history in Canada is rich, and, sadly, mostly unknown. 

Q: What moment from the past Century do you wish you’d been a witness to?

A: The first performance of Quartet for the End of Time in Stalag 8A in Poland. As Messiaen later wrote of the experience: "never have I had an audience who listened with such rapt attention and comprehension."

Q: Do you listen to music to get ready before the show? What music?

A: The music FROM the show is in my head whenever we do it. And that’s ok.

Q: This show’s been in development for 5 years. Have you ever done anything else that took five years?

Yup - most Volcano shows take this long to take shape, give or take a year or two.

Ross during the green-screen shoot in 2013

Q: Can you tell us about a surprising or memorable moment during the creation of Century Song?

A: When Greg and Deb are given too much time on their own while on tour, it’s like watching brothers at a family get-together - with Greg as the misbehaving little brother, and Deb as the long-suffering older brother telling the smaller one to knock it off. Lots of eye rolls. I love it. I love this team. It’s a deep joy working together.

Century Song begins January 19 (preview) at the Theatre Centre as a part of Progress. Tickets are available now. Learn more here.