Nakatani Gong Orchestra + SHHH!! Ensemble event | Photo: Elyse Bouvier

New Works Calgary

By Meghan Power

New Works Calgary (NWC) first emerged in 1984 as a performance space for new classical music, and as a collaborative space for contemporary artists and musicians to perform. First founded by artist John Snow and Quenten Doolittle. “Forty years later,” explains Artistic Director, rebecca bruton, “New Works continues to be a performance space for new classical music and a space for audiences and musicians to academically engage with new classical composition, while also finding ways for us to open up to the broader community — performance that introduces new artists to our community and new communities to our artists.”

Recently, NWC has been exploring the intersection of sound and ecology with their monthly soundwalk series. “We get a lot of people who would normally not be part of our concert series audience. New audience members are finding out about these soundwalks through their walking groups and community centres. And, we are collaborating with artists who may not have ever thought of NWC as a space for their practice before.”

 

A lot of NWC’s new programming is being driven by ways of non-doing, deep-listening, and engaging with public art. “These new programs are still artistically rigorous, but are also more easily accessible,” rebecca explains. “We are recognizing and unpacking the euro-centric history of new classical music — asking more questions about why new classical spaces have been centred around white artists? Asking how we can diversify and shift outside of academic spaces?”

 

Rebecca believes that by uplifting the local arts communities New Works is, “opening up a small fold of possibility for new ways of being. We are presenting works outside the mainstream that are offering a transformational experience — experiencing sound differently and thereby experiencing the world differently and even possibly planting seeds of hope within our communities at a time of great economic and world challenges.”

 

Funding through Calgary Arts Development’s (CADA) operating grant program has helped NWC support artists who may not have been otherwise accessible to the Calgary community and also are emphasizing the organization’s core values: supporting exploratory music, and cross-disciplinary artistic expression with a spirit of exploration, curiosity, openness and community connection.

 

“With the help of funding from CADA, in 2023 we were able to present The Nakatani Gong Orchestra (NGO) with the SHHH!! Ensemble (a Canadian piano/percussion new music duo). This was a 4-way co-presentation with NWC, Bug Incision, Sound Atlas Festival, and Contemporary Calgary (CS).” NGO, led by musician Tatsuya Nakatani, is essentially a large improvisational, travelling, contemporary sound art project. NWC invited 16 local artists to be part of the performance. The artist’s experience included a sound workshop with Nakatani to learn his technique and a pre-performance rehearsal ahead of the concert that Nakatani conducts.

 

“We live in a predatory attention economy with things like highly addictive social media that are designed to grab your attention and hold it there, taking up more and more time and space. A project, like the NGO, is profound in that it happens outside that economy — it creates space to pay attention to something different. This was such a unique experience for Calgary audiences and an equally unique opportunity for artists to collaborate and experiment in an unfamiliar way — thanks CADA!”