POSTPONED Tar Sands Songbook: Performance

Performance of Tar Sands Songbook

An illuminating work of documentary theater, the Tar Sands Songbook asks audiences to reconsider their personal relationships to oil. Creator Tanya Kalmanovitch knows these relationships all too well. She was born in Fort McMurray, Alberta at the beginning of industrial development of the Athabasca Oil Sands. As a teenager, Kalmanovitch made her decision to become a musician because “music had nothing to do with oil.” But when Fort McMurray shot to international attention as the flashpoint of clashes over energy, the environment, and the economy, Kalmanovitch was called to go home.

Kalmanovitch’s polyphonic piece weaves together virtuosic storytelling, original research, field recordings, photography, and an original, improvised score. Her voice joins those of First Nations elders, activists, engineers, oil patch workers and members of her own family as they renegotiate their relationships to a challenged landscape. With a fiddle in one hand and a laptop computer filled with sounds and images from Fort McMurray Kalmanovitch brings audiences to the heart of a community that many will never see, but that has everything to do with the way we live today.

In 2020, Kalmanovitch is launching an ambitious ten-year campaign to perform this piece in communities along the hundreds of thousands of miles of pipelines, truck routes and crude-by-rail lines that carry Alberta bitumen and its byproducts throughout North America. Along the way, she is collaborating with community members to write, speak, play and sing their own songs and stories about oil. Gathered over time and documented on the project website, these songs and stories create dialogue across distance, forming a repository that deepens and humanizes the conversation about oil and climate crisis.

About the Speaker

Tanya Kalmanovitch is a Juilliard-trained violist and ethnomusicologist (University of Alberta ‘08). Born in Fort McMurray, she has gone onto an international career including field-work in Chennai, Dublin, and Amsterdam; two residences at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music; and master classes at the Banff Centre, Guildhall School of Music & Drama, the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and many more. Since 2013, she has been Associate Professor at The New School in New York City.

Project Partners

This residency is part of the FUTURES/forward program, a national mentorship program embedding community-engaged artists with environmental organizations across Canada. Tanya Kalmanovitch is partnering with Climate Action Network-Réseau Action Climate (CAN-Rac), Judith Marcuse Projects (JMP) and the International Centre of Art for Social Change (ICASC). FUTURES/Forward is funded by the McConnell Foundation.

This event is presented by the University of Alberta, through the Sustainability Council, Just Powers and the Research-­Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory.