Poetry + Music + Dance Project comes to the Okanagan: The Muted Note

Appearing for the first time in Kelowna, Montréal based composer and trombonist Scott Thomson and dance artist and vocalist Susanna Hood will perform The Muted Note, a suite of songs and dances based on poems by P.K. Page.  The performance will be at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art on October 26^th, 2014.  Doors are at 7:30pm with the performance beginning at 8:00pm sharp.  Admission is $7 ($5 Alternator members).

“The Muted Note is a striking accomplishment. It ultimately resonates like P.K. Page’s galvanized language itself.”

-Stuart Broomer, Musicworks Magazine

The music of the suite, a hybrid of jazz and art-song, was composed by Scott Thomson while Susanna developed the choreography.  Susanna’s dances, like Scott’s songs, are made to be extended through improvisation and the creative input both activates and animates Page’s beautiful verse, the core of this provocatively unconventional Poetry + Music + Dance show.  The Muted Note premiered onstage at Toronto’s Citadel Theatre in September 2014.  Touring throughout Canada during the autumn of 2014, Susanna and Scott present The Muted Note as an unusual combination of Voice + Dance + Trombone, performing in cafes, art galleries, bars, dance studios, theatres, classrooms, lofts, and even outdoors.  The tour is also in support of their duo CD, also called The Muted Note (&records 2013.)

Susanna Hood is an award-winning dance artist renowned, especially, for her synthesis of dance and vocal improvisation, as well as her beautifully crafted choreography.  In performance, she sings the song lyrics with tremendous poise and intention, and animates them with her singular improvisations characterized by both their focus and wild abandon.  As part of their duo, Scott switches freely from accompanying Susanna to soloing in a vocal, extroverted style reminiscent of his teacher, the great American trombonist, Roswell Rudd.

P.K. (Patricia Kathleen) Page (1916-2010) is one of Canada’s most celebrated literary figures, and wrote some of this nation’s finest poems. She was also a visual artist, working as P.K. Irwin, whose artworks are in the collections of major museums including the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art is an artist-run centre located in Kelowna at the Rotary Centre for the Arts, 421 Cawston Avenue. The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art is a registered non-profit charitable organization dedicated to the development of the creative community. Since 1989, the Alternator has shown the work of emerging Canadian artists, focused on innovative and non-traditional mediums engaged in social and cultural issues.

For more information contact Lorna McParland, Artistic and Administrative Director, Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art at 250 868 2298 / dir@alternatorgallery.com. or Darren Williams, event organizer at 778-239-7670 /  saxothingee@hotmail.com