The Inaugural Susila Bryant Memorial Concert at the Cathedral: bringing together cultures, generations, and communities

Last Saturday evening, the inaugural Susila Bryant Memorial Concert – billed as “the mother of all cabarets” -  was a wonderful, multi-faceted event. If you missed the live performance, you can still view it online – and contribute to the al-Ahli Anglican Hospital in Gaza (administered by the Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem) by emailing me at hadaniditmars@gmail.com. For the same $25 ticket price, I will send you a private link to the video of the concert. You can also view a YouTube video of Bob York and I performing L’Hymne a L’Amour at KitsFest on August 9^th as a kind of sneak preview of the August 10^th programme.

The labour of love and honouring of my late mother, that also honoured mothers everywhere and the spirit of the Divine Feminine, was an ambitious undertaking. I found myself wearing multiple hats, including impresario, producer, director, fundraiser, publicist stage manager, video and photography coordinator and - of course-  performer.

Under the auspices of the lovely Donna Wong Juliani’s Spotlight Series, I conceived the concert as a kind of cabaret, integrating storytelling, poetry and music in a tightly choreographed 90-minute programme.

The connection between text and performance is something I’ve been exploring in my PhD work at Kings College London. In May, I did a presentation at a conference at UCL on three decades of Iraqi cultural resistance combining storytelling, photojournalism, excerpts from my books on Iraq, and Iraqi and Spanish sung poetry. The conference was called Traversing beyond Borders: Intermediality and Cross-Cultural Communication and the presentation was a version of a literary/musical event I did at a Baghdad art gallery last year edited for academia (!)

The memorial concert offered me a new opportunity to explore the connection between my passion for writing and for music as well as my ongoing interest in verbatim theatre.

I’ve been interested for a long time in the connection between journalistic, literary non-fiction and dramatic narratives, (a la David Hare and his verbatim theatre works like Via Dolorosa) and in the larger connection between culture and current affairs. When I worked in a newsroom as a journalist in the 2000s, some colleagues complained that I sang too many songs in news meetings, but I couldn’t help myself (!) When I was a journalist working in Iraq and Palestine, I instinctively sought out the artists, the writers, the poets, and the musicians- the very soul of troubled nations- to help myself and my readers understand the national dynamics. And of course, I managed to get a reference in my last intercessory prayers to Celine Dion singing “L’Hymne à l’amour” at the Eiffel Tower (my favourite new anthem of hope!)

Last Saturday’s concert also offered an opportunity for exploration of the connection between the sacred and the arts. My current book in progress on ancient sites and contemporary culture in Iraq – whose narrative fuses the “disappearance” of my mother and that of world heritage explores how the sacred is defined by loss- and is also given meaning by active cultural presence.

My work is very much about bridging cultures and generations and the memorial concert was a continuation of that. The performers I brought together were intergenerational and intercultural. Bob York, a jazz pianist (who once played the Cave) and long-time friend of and accompanist to my mother, anchored the evening with his marvellous keyboards on the grand piano.

Some of the storytelling included a tale about Bob attending my parents’ wedding in Prince George in 1965 and in fact, driving up from Vancouver with them in an old 1964 Pontiac that broke down on the way. My script connected the local to the global with my mother’s old friend and fellow musician Themba Tana and his colleague Shumba Saint Albert singing a very moving rendition of a Zulu song called Mama Dearest that really evoked my mother’s spirit. I sang a song from my mother’s youth – Que Sera Sera- as an intergenerational duet with her dear friend and local jazz legend Lorraine Foster.

I invited Syrian Christian musician Grace Zako to accompany me on oud on sung poetry by Garcia Lorca, and to sing her own song-  a Syrian Christian hymn that evoked not only my mother‘s grandparents who were Syrian Christians fleeing the Ottomans, who came to settle in Prince Rupert in 1906 (and whose son was adopted by the great Haida chief William Matthews), but also her own mother who passed away last year. I wove all the songs and stories together with a narrative that was part poetry, part verbatim theatre and part invocation of the Great Mother.

I placed photographs of my mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother Massady, who came from the Bekka Valley to Canada at age 16, on top of the grand piano – creating a kind of alternate musical altar. In an act of deep ceremony, I brought the spirit of my ancestors to Christ Church Cathedral.

It was a great honour to be able to hold this event in a church with so many family connections (where many family members were married, baptized or eulogized) where my mother received such wonderful pastoral care in her final year of life on this earth.

It was also a great reminder of the church’s role in the community, not only as a place of worship, but as a cultural nexus.

It was a privilege to be able to perform in a place where the cutting-edge Savage God Theatre - that married the sacred to the theatrical - once performed. It was also an interesting experience to plan and execute a performance in a sacred space, and to explore the connection between culture and rituals of worship.

I attended an Early Music Vancouver concert last week at the cathedral that brought together Lebanese- Palestinian tenor Haitham Haidar, Israeli oud and mandolin player Alon Sariel and South Asian raga singer Shruti Ramani within the context of a Bach programme. I enjoyed the intercultural performance but also the opportunity to observe the altar I see each Sunday as a stage. Afterwards, I got tips from the performers on audio, lighting and choreography in the cathedral space they’d performed in many times.

Within the context of our own intergenerational and multicultural congregation, the cathedral seems like the perfect place for performances that bring together disparate cultures, and artistic idioms. I look forward to future opportunities to further explore these connections.

The cathedral is a true sanctuary and a cultural touchstone for the community that I hope will continue to grow in its embrace of the world outside of the parish, while still maintaining its unique sense of grace and grandeur.

Beyond the successful performance, the whole evening was a deep act of ceremony for me, and I felt that it helped take my mother onto the next leg of her celestial journey.

I am so grateful to Donna Wong Juliani ( who of course was the past executive Director of Savage God and the widow of its founder John Juliani ) to all of the performers and to the building staff; to the editors at Stir who wrote such a moving tribute to my mum and the event, and to Margaret Gallagher at CBC Radio who mentioned the concert on North by Northwest; and to my lovely volunteer photographer Seven Liu whose images are shared here.

And I am of course deeply grateful to my late great mama, singer-songwriter Susila Bryant, whose spirit of courage, grace and resilience inspires me still. God bless her and mamas everywhere. Amen.