Fort Albany’s Mike Metatawabin has joined up with author and musician Manuel Menrath to present Songs of the Land: A Spoken Word Experience. Menrath is from Luzern, Switzerland.
The live performance will feature Metatawabin’s poetry set to Menrath’s music. The performance will have nine songs with nine poems and will run for about half an hour.
The two met each other years ago when Menrath was visiting Canada to do research about Treaty #9. “A friend reached out to see if anyone was interested in helping Manuel and I put my name forward,” Metatawabin said. “We got to know each other and I started sharing my poetry with him. We were on a plane together and he read my poetry and got really excited and said music was jumping out of him while he was reading it. And then he asked me if he could lay down music to my poems.”
The project was three years in the making.
“It’s an exciting project for me. I never imagined my poetry would come out this way,” Metatawabin said.
Metatawabin said the main themes through the performance are the Residential School experience, the land and development on the land and asks the question ‘what do we do moving forward?’
The performance can be viewed live online at 1:30pm EST on September 2, 3, 4, 21 and 22.
You can watch the performance here:
https://vimeo.com/event/1248336/68bd229542
A trailer for Songs of the Land can be viewed on YouTube here:
It looks like the swallows are back and that is a sure sign of spring and warmer weather to come. A couple of weeks ago I heard the honking of Niska (Canada...
If you pause to think about it, there are special people in our lives that we always assumed would always be around no matter where our life journey takes...