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The Muted Note
Extensive Autumn Tour for Multifaceted Poetry + Music + Dance Project
Based on Poems by P.K. Page

Wednesday 24 September 7:30pm at NAC
FREE EVENT

The Muted Note is a striking accomplishment. It ultimately resonates like P.K. Page’s galvanized language itself.”  –Stuart Broomer, Musicworks

Montreal 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, 40 times and in 9 Canadian provinces in the autumn of 2014.

Scott composed the suite, a hybrid of jazz and artsong, and Susanna subsequently choreographed the songs on three other dancers with live music by Scott’s quintet, The Disguises. Susanna’s dances, like Scott’s songs, are made to be extended through improvisation, and the creative input of their superb collaborators will animate and activate Page’s beautiful verse, the core of this provocatively unconventional Poetry + Music + Dance show. (See personnel below.)

The stage work will premiere with a run at Toronto’s Citadel Theatre, 5-7 September, and then at Montreal’s Monument National, Studio Hydro-Québec, 2-5 October, a co-presentation of Tangente and L’OFF Festival de Jazz.

Apart from these shows, throughout the autumn, Susanna and Scott will tour extensively throughout Canada to play The Muted Note as a duo, the unconventional combination of Voice + Dance + Trombone, performing in cafes, art galleries, bars, dance studios, theatres, classrooms, lofts, and even outdoors. Susanna and Scott will be touring to support their duo CD, also called The Muted Note (&records 2013), and their presenters range across the fields of music, dance, and literature, as well as in universities.

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.

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.