Creative Collaborations: Ballet Kelowna and OSO
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With help from the Central Okanagan Foundation and a Canada council grant, this season will bring a special collaboration with Ballet Kelowna which Thomson has been dreaming of since she arrived in the valley.
The Falcon’s Trumpet, as the collaboration is called, will see the orchestra recorded and its music sent on tour with the dancers as they perform in communities around the province.
Celebrated Canadian composer R. Murray Schaffer—currently in Brazil where he just sold 78,000 of his textbooks to the Brazilian government for teachers to use in the country’s schools—wrote The Falcon’s Trumpet. Ballet Kelowna’s artistic director David LaHay, did the choreography for the dancers.
Lead trumpet will see celebrated trumpeter Guy Few on Okanagan stages conveying Schaffer’s ability to connect with nature and compose music from his surroundings.
Schaffer apparently placed musicians around the lake, at points where they could not see one another, to improvise in a natural setting, feeding off the wildlife and sounds of the shoreline.
Schafer only recently got a phone, he’s so noise averse, and protects his ears like many musicians might covet their favourite instrument. This kind of eccentricity only appears to make him more interesting to work with for the music director who will take the collaborative project one level further and work with the creative and critical studies department at UBCO to help students hone in on the process of creating and the role collaboration plays in art.
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