In Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild, three generations of women struggle to free their loved one from the grips of the werewolf-like Rogarou in an effort to bring home a missing husband and protect their land from corporate interests.
The story is so gritty, sexy and dramatic, it was named Indigo’s top book of 2019, beating out big titles like The Testaments by Margaret Atwood and Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid.
Now, about $4 million is being invested for an Indigenous-led creative team to turn the book into an opera, and stage the world premiere next spring in Toronto.
It’s a gamble that could draw in a younger audience and opera neophytes — and challenge purists who prefer the “core” repertoire.
Empire of Wild takes place in the Georgian Bay Métis community of Penetanguishene, Ont., where Dimaline grew up. Composer Ian Cusson is also from there, and when he read the book, he recognized the Rogarou from the stories his mother used to tell.
“Even though it’s a work of fiction, I was reading people that I knew and ways of speaking that I’d heard growing up,” he told CBC News earlier this month in Toronto when the cast and orchestra were workshopping the new music.
“The sort of radical offer that we’re making is to say [the opera] is a space where stories like this one can exist,” Cusson said.
“They don’t just have to be stories from 200 years ago or from Europe.… They can be stories that resonate with people today.”
Modern voices
Cusson said he and Dimaline, who wrote the libretto, wanted to create modern characters modern audiences could see themselves in.
“There’s queer characters and … a family who are roofers and blue collar and they’re going about their lives and having to deal with like the most extreme scenarios.”
They also talk the way modern people talk. That includes swear words and dick jokes. “Oh there are f-bombs,” said Cusson, acknowledging that’s perhaps not what people expect to hear when listening to the huge voices singing arias.
He also likened this production to a “film on steroids” and said he loved working with the more macabre, horror-like elements of the story too.
“I feel like it really resonates with what especially younger people are hoping for in a night of entertainment,” he said.
Innu soprano Elisabeth St-Gelais, 30, plays the protagonist, Joan. She has read Empire of Wild twice – and agrees there is a lot in this story young audiences can connect with.
“[Joan] has a couple of … maybe bad habits that she relies on when she’s in crisis…. And I mean, everybody has that. So I think it’s very interesting to show something like that,” she said, referring to her character’s hard-drinking nights as she grapples with the disappearance of her husband.
Challenging the status quo
At its heart, Empire of Wild is a story about power, resistance and resilience.
Joan’s husband goes missing one night, after a fight about whether or not to sell her land. When she finds him 11 months later, he’s working as a preacher, seems not to remember her, and is being carefully managed by a man who seems all too concerned with industrial projects in the region.
There are darker forces at play and only old magic, passed down from generation to generation, can reunite Joan with her love. Both Cusson and St-Gelais said that is a key element of this story: intergenerational support along strong matrilineal lines.
The tale was inspired by the Métis story of the Rogarou, but the characters are embodied by a wide range of talents including Kwagiulth and Stó:lō mezzo-soprano Marion Newman and Anishinaabe baritone Evan Korbut.
“The Indigenous artists that get to bring to life these roles … while they may be different from their own specific lived experiences, they tell a truth that has a commonality and is unique among many Indigenous people,” said Cusson. “The story of resilience, the story of survivance and survival.”
“Survivance,” a combination of survival and resistance, is used by Indigenous scholars to describe how Indigenous peoples have not only survived settler colonialism, but also continued their cultural customs — enhancing them and generating new ones along the way.
A different kind of creation story
St-Gelais said it has been a phenomenal experience working on an opera led by Indigenous creators.
“Indigenous people are going through a moment, an era of … blooming in every, every side of society, in science and art, in business,” she told CBC.
Cree costume designer Jeff Chief is part of the creative team, as is Algonquin director Yvette Nolan, who Cusson likes to quote when he describes how an Indigenous approach to creating art is different:
“Instead of having this triangular shape, where there’s usually a person at the top, how do we bend the triangle and expand its edges to make the circle?”
It’s about an equality of voices, where everyone involved – down to the person who empties garbage cans – is invited into the circle of creation where their contribution is seen as valuable.
Cusson said he wants to see this method of creation repeated in other operas and other opera companies.
“It should be done everywhere. It’s the best way to make art.”
