ELORA – The Elora Festival is underway, with more than 20 concert experiences taking place between July 11 and 27.
It is in its 46th season and has a strong reputation for the choirs and vocal ensembles it features.
The Elora Singers professional chamber choir is the festival’s ensemble-in-residence.
On July 12, the Elora Festival’s concert hall, Gambrel Barn, was full for a performance by Jeremy Dutcher.
Dutcher is a Juno- and Polaris Prize-winning Two-Spirit song carrier, vocalist, classical composer, activist and classical-trained vocalist.
He lives in Montréal and is a Wolastoqiyik member of the Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick.
Dutcher sings mostly in his traditional language, Wolastoqey, and he translated parts of his songs for the audience during the Elora Festival performance.
“Singing in my language is important to me because we have less than 500 fluent speakers left,” Dutcher said.
“I do this work because of my mom,” Lisa Perley-Dutcher, who started the first Wolastoqey immersion school, he added.
“Jeremy’s music transcends boundaries: unapologetically playful in its incorporation of classical and jazz influences, full of reverence for the traditional songs of his home, and teeming with the urgency of modern-day resistance,” states his bio on the Elora Festival website.
During his musical performance Dutcher talked and sang about colonization, language, water protection, queer identity, Elders and ancestors, delivering hard hitting topics with a strong heaping of comedy, throwing his head back in laughter at times.
