Music on Main presents the world premiere of The Tempest Project, running July 17-22, 2024, at the Vancouver Playhouse.

The incredible production invites audiences to embark on a music-filled journey through the sound-and-light-encircled lobbies, halls, and backstage areas of the 62-year-old venue. Drawing upon themes in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, this musically and theatrically audacious production weaves love, magic, and wonder into a poetic meditation on universal challenges.

“Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest, has inspired artists for more than 400 years. It’s filled with storms and magic, and its themes of revenge, forgiveness, power struggle, and freedom continue to feel relevant today,” says David Pay, Artistic Director of Music on Main and Director of The Tempest Project. “We’re using those themes as the inspiration for musical scenes that we’re setting throughout the Playhouse, and we’ll lead small groups of audiences on various paths through the theatre. As they travel, they’ll be greeted with live performances, recordings from hidden speakers, projections, lighting, audio and optical illusions, and more. The ultimate aim is to pull audiences into a ‘strange new world’ and challenge their very definition of what a music performance can be.”

Inspired by the themes that have made Shakespeare’s Tempest such an endearing work, the world premiere experience will use music to access motifs of revenge and forgiveness, freedom, betrayal, and redemption. The diverse ensemble of musicians and creators developing the project – The Tempest Project Company – bring their insights as an intercultural collective to these explorations, imbuing the project’s layers of meaning with their own lived experiences.

More than five years in the making, the project integrates the contributions of a rich team of musicians, composers, designers, and theatre practitioners. Led by Artistic Director David Pay and Artistic Planning & Operations Manager and Producer Shayna Goldberg, the creation process has blended techniques from devised theatre, intercultural collaboration, and contemporary music composition, along with workshops on a vast array of subjects, including history and social sciences.

To craft the work’s otherworldly sounds, the project has commissioned pieces from Gabriel Kahane, a musician and storyteller lauded by The New Yorker as “one of the finest songwriters of the day”; Nancy Tam, a musician specializing in theatrical, multi-channel sound creations; the multi-faceted Alfredo Santa Ana, whose body of work includes live classical compositions, electronic music, and playing lead guitar in an avant-prog rock band; and Saina Khaledi, an award-winning Iranian-Canadian musician and member of The Tempest Project Company who teaches santour at Capilano University. In addition, there are improvised arrangements based on Solange’s “Things I Imagined,” as well as other works.

Their music will be brought to life by an eclectic and unconventional assemblage of extraordinary musicians, including Julia Ulehla, vocals; Paolo Bortolussi, flute; Aram Bajakian, guitar; Saina Khaledi, santour; Dailin Hsieh, zheng; Julia Chien, percussion; Jonathan Lo, cello; and Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, piano. The team also includes Dramaturg Melanie Yeats and Production Manager Alexis Douglas.