Beautiful Feet

Photo by Bill Cooper, featuring Ben McAteer (James) Who called it?! Scottish Opera's Ben McAteer just beat out some fierce competition to win Outstanding Opera Performance at the  MyTheatre Awards  for last season's  The Devil Inside ! Composed by Stuart MacRae with libretto by Louise Welsh,  The Devil Inside  was Scottish Opera's North American debut featuring international artists including Matthew Richardson, Michael Rafferty, Nicholas Sharratt, Rachel Kelly, Ben McAteer, and Steven Page. CONGRATULATIONS to Ben and all involved in bringing this outstanding production to Toronto. We are proud and thrilled. The Nominees for Outstanding Opera Performance: Jane Archibald in Ariodante (Canadian Opera Company) Rachel Kelly in The Devil Inside (Tapestry Opera) Ben McAteer in The Devil Inside (Tapestry Opera) - WINNER! Erin Wall in The Marriage of Figaro (Canadian Opera Company) Sondra Radvanovsky in Norma (Canadian Op...

A good piece of art takes you out of yourself. Last night, Toro , the ‘dance’ piece, allowed me to forget an unrelated incident from an hour previous that had left me shaking. I put dance in quotes for positive reasons, not to denigrate the performance. As Matthew Jocelyn likes to do, we were presented with a genre-bending performance that focused on dance but also employed world music, singing and drama to create the kind of eye-opening and enlightening CanStage offering that Toronto is beginning to expect from it. Toro was the quickly re-visioned performance after one of the two booked dancers, Israel Galvan, had a serious knee injury in Paris and had to withdraw. But the audience did not suffer for it: four remarkable musicians augmented the dance of Akram Kahn , and I had an education. David Azurza, countertenor, B C Manjunath, percussion, Bobote, flamenco and Christine Leboutte, contralto, provided an organic background of vocalization, and instrumental and body percussion wh...