
By Neil Armstrong
The weekend before the official start of summer featured the long-awaited all-Black production— Canadian Opera Company’s “Aportia Chryptych: A Black Opera for Portia White” and was well received by patrons who packed the Canadian Opera Company Theatre on Front Street in Toronto.
The first Black Canadian concert singer to achieve international fame, Portia White had a voice described by one critic as “a gift from heaven.” This new opera from HAUI and Sean Mayes reclaims her remarkable life story and celebrates her legacy in a production that blends spoken word, rap, folk songs, R&B, soul, jazz, and classical opera.
In the final moments of Portia White’s life, she lifts the veil between life and death and is transported into the spirit realm. Fractured into her Body, Soul, and Spirit, Portia is confronted by familial fragments and a maelstrom of memories in pursuit of her passion, intertwined with the cryptic coded messages from her past. As she bids farewell to her earthly existence, she leaves behind a legacy of mercy, sisterhood, and the unwavering pursuit of truth realizing that it’s not the deeds of our past that define us, but how we live that truly matters, notes a synopsis.
With Neema Bickersteth as Portia Body, Adrienne Danrich as Portia Spirit, SATE as Portia Soul, and Henos Girma as Child, the opera pulled from songs of various genres, including some of the late Truro, Nova Scotia born Black Canadian contralto’s singing, audio and visual recordings, and photo stills to broaden its storytelling.
Directed by HAUI, who was also the librettist and co-composer alongside conductor and composer Sean Mayes, the world premiere of “Aportia Chryptych: A Black Opera for Portia White” described some of the racism she encountered as a Black woman charting a path in classical music, and people and things that were contemporary to the time she lived. It also projected into the future to imagine some of the issues and happenings she would have been concerned with had she lived beyond 1968. She was born on June 24, 1911, in Truro, Nova Scotia and died of cancer in Toronto on February 13, 1968.
Bickersteth, Danrich and SATE were very convincing in their performances of White’s tripartite being—soul, body and spirit— and the virtuosity of her voice. Girma wove through aspects of her life in depicting her only child, Jimmy.
It is in the Bardo “(the liminal state between death and rebirth), the woman known as Portia White divides into body, soul, and spirit. These three aspects of herself sometimes work in harmony and at other points come into conflict, shaping the arc of the opera’s narrative. A centrally positioned barber’s chair becomes both a throne and an altar, while the stage is structured as a crossroads with a 6-metre oculus suspended overhead, serving both as a portal and as a surface for projections that call up the people and events of White’s life.”
White was forced to give up her child when she chose a life dedicated to music and so she is depicted as a character seeking resolution. “In the final moment of her ascent to the afterlife, this opera asks: who gets left behind? Ultimately, although Aportia Chryptych: A Black Opera for Portia White leaves us with no easy answers, there is consolation to be found in the redemptive power of song—and the power of art to heal,” notes a synopsis of it.
The opera beckons to those of us in the present to not forget the contribution of White to Canada hence the fitting song of hers at the end, “Think on me” which was also heard earlier in it.
After the opening night performance of “Aportia Chryptych,” the opera’s creative team gifted an orchestral suite of three arias from the piece to Sistema Canada so that young people can learn more about emerging Black operas and have access to music from this that they can play.
Sistema Toronto provides musical and intellectual opportunities to children in Toronto’s underserved communities, with the goal of inspiring transformative social action.