Earth, water, fire, air: these are the elemental constituents of the blue-green ball we call Earth, the home that we all share, and for which we are all responsible.

Each of these elements exists in asynchronous, cyclical, and deep time, according to nêhiyaw teachings. Director Tyson Houseman gently reminds audiences of these simple and fundamental truths in his multimedia opera entitled Askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ which runs over three performances at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines in late November.

The stage is scattered with bowls, speakers, a long strip of reflective foil, mirrors and twigs. When the ensemble of four takes the stage together, Houseman at the centre of it all, back to his audience, begins to pan digital cameras across these items, which create a live video projected on the wall behind the stage, revealing in close-up each of these pieces transforming before our eyes into skies streaked with Northern lights, mountain ranges, and forests. At the heart of a natural disaster lies the personal history of Houseman’s relationship to the land of the West Coast.

We are told in the press release that “Houseman’s practice focuses on aspects of nêhiyaw ideologies and teachings — speaking to land-based notions of non-linear time and the interwoven relations between humans and their ecologies.” This sounds abstract. But I can confidently say that I was left with a keen understanding of this practice after experiencing askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ.

The creators recently told Sophia Jama of Westmount Magazine that the title describes “a year, it is summer; it is the earth, it is the ground.” In other words, it is a place in time across time.

The piece begins with lights in a night sky, which Houseman brings up onscreen, crouching amongst the household objects that create the shapes projected up on the wall ahead of him. The night sky breathes with refractions through a bowl of water, and dance as another water bowl sits atop a set of speakers, creating mandalas of moving light and colour. Above the mountain range implied by the shadow of tinfoil, towering trees appear as his camera crosses branches lined up on small stands.

Askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ is an opera in form and content, the resonant baritone of Jonathan Adams singing in nehiyawewin, evocative of an arrhythmic Gregorian chant, accompanied by cellist Leah Weitzner on the viola de gamba, and Montreal-based composer Devon Bate creating a cosmic texture of complementary sounds on an electric guitar and laptop.

While the performance incorporates common consumer technologies to spectacular ends — cameras, speakers, projectors — it is unmistakably operatic in scale. Not only because its narrative is sung resonantly throughout, in another language, in a heavenly range, but because of the dramatically heartbreaking tragedy at its climax. Everything eventually ends.

Houseman’s quartet reveals in sound and onscreen a vista of the beauty of the mountains and forests of British Columbia, the colonial name given to this land. Slowly, loudly, we see lights turn orange, textures grow tongue-like, as the song of the story swells to a cry of agony. The forest is on fire.

As the flames die down, the colour and sound decrescendo to a peaceful void, wherein photos and videos presumably of the director’s family emerge. A verdant restoration grows around these videos and their sounds of laughter, of a childhood from which Houseman shares personal scenes. This deeply affecting inclusion brings the whole work of Askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ out of the abstract and down to earth, encouraging love of our home and native land.

Davon Bate shared with me that the piece is headed to the Vancouver PuSh Performing Arts Festival in January, where it will no doubt be felt by West-Coast audiences as a welcome homecoming. Surely, Houseman, originally a BC-based artist, has a unique connection to those lands, waters, forests, and mountains.

The monumental quality of Askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ carries well and comes across even to this metropolitan Montreal audience like a dirge, a lament grieving the irreversible damage that climate change has wrought upon nature. Houseman’s human element reminds us that the age of the Anthropocene will have destructive impacts but also become the site of our stewardship of the natural world, and our familial relationship to it which we too easily forget. It is a credit to this small ensemble and Houseman’s mastery of puppetry and performance art that such a vast scope of perspectives on the world is so vividly brought into the theatre’s interior space.

I can always depend upon the programming at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines to bring timely and thought-provoking themes to their stage, and Askîwan ᐊᐢᑮᐊᐧᐣ is without exception a testament to their mission.◼︎

_{Cover image: © Tyler Houseman}