As the waves of the pandemic have waxed and waned, Asitha Tennekoon has been a creative constant, continuing to bring live music to the shut-in citizens of Toronto. Prior to COVID-19, the Sri Lankan-born, Toronto-based Tenor was a regular presence on operatic stages across Canada and the US, Since the summer of 2020, he has been a featured performer in Toronto-based Tapestry Opera’s Box Concerts – what he describes as a “concert on wheels that shares opera and musical-theatre music” with frontline workers, care home residents and patients in hospitals and private homes.
Box Concerts began as “kind of a pickup thing last year”, with Tennekoon selecting and recording five songs and touring them as free concerts at care homes and hospitals. This year, Tapestry Opera revised the 30-minute concerts to reflect the company’s mandate to create new music and operas. They brought on Benton Roark and Donna Michelle St. Bernard to build a show that weaves familiar tunes into a framing narrative. In this version, Tennekoon portrays a traveling performer who takes messages from one community to another. The conceit is that when he sings in one neighborhood, he drops off messages to the people there and gathers messages from them to take to the next. Part of his character’s journey is that he has not been home in a while, and is finally close to home after traveling and performing. He needs to write a message for someone he has not seen in a long while, but is struggling to find the words due to the nature of their relationship when they stopped communicating. “So there are still operatic arias,” he explains. “They are still musical theatre songs. But in between the songs, there are the sections that they have written and composed.”
And Tennekoon and the creative team have discovered that what works – the nature of the interrupted relationship, and the songs that will be sung – depends very much on the location they are visiting: “It is very much a stage kind of presentation where people will be needing to watch and go along on this journey.” This flexibility is the “beauty of the Box Concerts”. “It gives me the agency as the performer there to figure out why we’re setting up. To connect with people there. To connect with the staff there, the residents there. To see which one of these things would work best for the location. Especially with some of the care homes, I think it’s just beautiful to see some of the residents singing along to musical-theatre songs that they’ve known from when they were younger.”
Since the Box Concerts began, Tennekoon’s goal has been simple: to bring each audience a show that they will enjoy, whatever that might end up looking like. In each location, he chooses songs that he feels will best suit the audience. He recalls a performance at a care home last year where the residents were all Italian. “The way I picked the songs and figured out which songs to bookend the concert with was different from some of the previous concerts I performed. I did the Italian songs at the beginning and at the end, as opposed to right at the top and then going into the musical theatre set.”
One constant between last year’s and this year’s Box Concerts is the “idea of connection and reconnection”. One of the songs Tennekoon closes the concert with is ‘Being Alive’ from Stephen Sondheim’s Company. For Tennekoon, the fundamental idea of being human is about connecting with people: “It’s about having people in your life and being involved in other people’s lives in a way that is fulfilling. That really hits the nail on the head for me – to see how many people were brought to life by music being shared with them, to have that chance to be outside of the building. Even if they weren’t watching, some of them had their eyes closed and were nodding along or mouthing the words.” Connecting with the audience personally by speaking to them before and after each concert is the most special part for Tennekoon. Even though he is performing the same songs, knowing the stories of some of the residents and care workers enables him to make a performance unique: “That gives me a lot of information to funnel into how I am going to present this set of songs – or this show that has its own formula –in a way that will resonate for this specific audience.”
Tennekoon’s respect for his audiences and the broader community has long been a guiding principle in his work. Since graduating in 2016, he has performed steadily. His portrayal of Paul in Tapestry Opera/Scottish Opera’s Rocking Horse Winner, based on D.H. Lawrence’s short story, earned him the 2016 Dora Award for Best Male Performance. (He reprised this performance in an album recording of Rocking Horse Winner in May 2020.) In 2019, he performed the role of the vicious racist magistrate and merchant John Peyton in Tapestry Opera’s world premiere of Shanawdithit, again to popular and critical acclaim. In addition to Tapestry Opera, he has performed with Against the Grain Theatre, Vancouver Opera, Soundstreams Canada, Opera on the Avalon, Opera 5, and Opera Lafayette.
His star continues to rise . . . but he mentions none of this during a candid Zoom chat on a rainy Friday morning. There is a noticeable absence of self-aggrandizement. He is a deeply reflective artist who maintains a steady focus on the role of the arts and his own responsibility to both the arts and the community. In keeping with this, Tennekoon is a co-founder of new Toronto-based indie opera company Amplified Opera, which is “very much a process-driven organization” aiming to place artists at the centre of public discourse. His work with Amplified Opera includes participating in residencies, leading workshops, and advocating for change through the company’s two-year residency as Disruptor-In-Residence at the Canadian Opera Company. “I have a hope that a lot of the values of lots of companies will be reshaped,” he says of the collaboration. In his experience, many organizations pursue “excellence” in a way that marginalizes certain artists and communities. “Whatever you want to define as ‘excellence’, I think it still should be within a frame of the values we have in order to serve the community. As non-profit organizations, the underlying goal should be what the community needs. That needs to inform the values of an organization.”
In his experience, the motivation behind pursuing a career in the arts too easily gets lost in a “hierarchical and often capitalist driven system” that reduces to two key questions: “how do we present something that is ‘excellent’. And how do we sell tickets and make money?’” He readily concedes that these considerations are important, but argues they are not the most important. First and foremost should be “what the organization is trying to do for the people in the community that they are based in.”
In this vein, “the fear of things starting back up” has preoccupied him in the past week. He worries that the industry will return to what it used to be: “I would love for organizations to just think about what really matters, and what it is that art is supposed to do. Really soul search for what it is you want to achieve with your organization – whatever organization you’re a part of – and whom does that serve, and go from there. Are the people who are going to be affected by your decisions at the table when you are making those decisions?” While Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) committees are important, he reflects on how EDI work need not be the special province of one body. It can be foundational to everything that a company is doing because “that work doesn’t just serve one specific community or just a few specific communities… In the long run, it serves everyone.” And the sooner organizations make that part of the work foundational, the sooner “we’re going to really be doing something meaningful that reaches more people – and something that speaks to a wider part of the community.”
On a personal level, Tennekoon credits the Box Concerts with helping him to reconnect with the community and to reconsider his own reasons for pursuing a music career in the first place. After graduating from school, he realized that to work in the industry, there were obligatory “unwritten rules” to follow: “You need to present yourself a certain way. You need to engage with people a certain way. I was never one of those people that was like, ‘I want to sing at the Met one day.’ For me, it was always that I wanted to be somewhere where I could perform, where people would come see me perform, and where that would make some sort of difference. If that gets me to the Met, great. If not, I’ll still be happy doing this – because I want it to make a difference in people’s lives.”
This introspection has prompted Tennekoon to step off the “treadmill” of taking whichever contracts come his way, in order to make a living and stay relevant. The concerts have proven the restorative power of music and its ability to create community – and that is the kind of work he will prioritize: “The Box Concerts have been so fulfilling! I really love that I get to connect with people before and after. That the things I say between the songs change, based on those conversations. Just being able to be up there singing to people, and seeing them smile, and seeing them mouth the words. . . . In a year where they have often not been able to leave their building – when they have not been able to have anyone come inside and visit them – to see the difference the concert makes, and hear what people tell me afterwards. That is so fulfilling for me.” These concerts are one of the few times that Tennekoon has felt like he is making a difference with art, as opposed to being on stage. And this feeling has helped him to overcome the superficial fear that “this needs to be a perfect performance, so the reviewers say this, so I’ll get hired again”.
On July 10,11, 17, and 18, the broader community will have the opportunity to see Tennekoon perform seven Box Concerts, directed by Michael Hidetoshi Mori, in Toronto’s High Park Amphitheatre, as a part of Canadian Stage’s Dream in High Park. On July 17 at 3 pm, Tapestry Opera is hosting a special extended show, including highlights from Rocking Horse Winner as well as Box Concerts, and with Lucia Cesaroni and Midorish Marsh joining Tennekoon on stage. The family-friendly concerts feature music from Dear Evan Hansen, Company, and Massenet’s Werther. Through that simple story of a travelling musician who is relaying messages, Tennekoon will “just connect with people and do what art does”.
The bottom line is simple. “Singing is the most beautifully visceral form of sharing and emoting and connecting with people. And if that beauty is not at the foundation, and everything else is not built on that, then I don’t understand what it is we’re doing!”
Tickets to the Box Concerts at High Park can be purchased here.
© Arpita Ghosal, SesayArts Magazine, 2021
