As you walk the trails, experience a variety of artistic disciplines in intimate performances that reflect the beautiful natural environment around you. Discover artists at different locations around each park, enchanting your senses and immersing you in a deeply-rooted feeling of place. We suggest you plan to spend approximately one hour to enjoy the park and performances.
Join us and CreativelyUnited.org in taking steps to reduce our personal carbon footprints in life and at Voices in Nature. We encourage you to take the bus or bike to the park, as well as bringing your own reusable water bottle and snack.
June 1 | 5-7PM
June 2 | 5-7PM
Transportation and Parking: Parking is available nearby at Lochside Elementary School, 1145 Royal Oak Drive, a 4-minute walk from the park. Limited handicapped and drop off parking for those with mobility challenges is available at the park’s Royal Oak entrance. Park is located close to trails and active transportation routes. To see a full site map with parking and washrooms marked, click here.
To visit performance sites through the park, you will need to be able to travel a wide packed gravel trail (mostly flat with a low-grade hill to/from Blenkinsop side.) Portable accessible washroom at Royal Oak entrance and non-accessible washroom available at park at Blenkinsop entrance.
June 6 | 5-7PM
June 7 | 5-7PM
Transportation and Parking: Parking is available on site at the Beacon Hill Parking Lot, accessible via Circle Drive and the Arbutus Way angle parking. There is additional street parking available around the park. Members of the Pacific Opera team will be avilable to meet visitors at the paths entrance on the corn of Cook Street & Dallas Road.
June 9 |5-7PM
June 10 | 5-7PM
Transportation and Parking: Parking is available on site near Cary Castle Mews, with designated wheelchair accessible parking located in front of Government House. Washrooms can be found beside the Chauffeur’s Cottage, across from the parking lot. To see a full site map with parking and washrooms marked, click here.
June 13 | 4-6PM
June 18 | 4-6PM
Transportation and Parking: Parking available on site. To see a site map with performance locations, lick here.
June 19 | 2-4PM
Enjoy art and music as they come together to create a Family Sunday like no other! Be serenaded in the gardens, amongst the artwork, and from the top of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria as you experience it’s new exhibition, Adorned.
The mandate of the ANSWER2 (All Nations Strong Warriors for the Environment and Resurgence) Collective is to walk the path of resurgence and environmental protection through performances of song and dance. Learning from knowledge keepers and elders, creating new songs and dances while sharing those from their traditions will ensure their continuous growth. The collective is made up of female identifying and two spirit Indigenous people who endeavor to honour and inspire their Indigenous communities, and to educate others in Indigenous worldview of Mother Earth. The Collective is committed to building respectful relationships by following protocol of the nation in whose territory they perform by researching the First Peoples’ Arts Map, the First Peoples’ Language Map and by meeting face to face with the nation. The Collective will educate new members and offer an open door for a 2-year space of cultural learning.
Jessica is from the Tseshaht First Nation, Nuu chah nulth. Jessica comes from a large family who were champions for cultural revival and who unfailingly adhered to the tradition and culture, despite the formidable Potlatch Ban. Jessica’s parents and grandparents attended the Port Alberni Indian Residential School.
In 2015 Jessica founded ANSWER (All Nations Strong Women for Education and Resurgence) for Indigenous women living in the Songhees and Esquimalt traditional territories. Their mandate is to educate and create their traditional regalia, songs and dances while performing ceremony using protocols to activate spirituality.
June 1 & 13
Montréal bass Simon Chalifoux will make his debut with Pacific Opera Victoria in the Civic Engagement Program. In 2016-2017, he was a member of Calgary Opera Emerging Artist Program. His debut with Edmonton Opera was in the title role of Le nozze di Figaro. His most recent performances were: Coline (La bohème), Gremin (Eugene Onegin), Sarastro (The Magic Flute), Harasta (Cunning Little Vixen).
June 7
Zoe Dickinson is a poet and bookseller from Victoria, British Columbia. Her poetry is rooted in the Pacific coastline, with a focus on local ecology and human relationships with nature. She has been published in literary journals such as Existere, Prairie Fire, and Contemporary Verse 2. Her first chapbook, Public Transit, was published in 2015 by Leaf Press, and her second chapbook, intertidal: poems from the littoral zone, is the 2022 winner of the Raven Chapbook competition. She is the Artistic Director of the Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series.
Chinese-Canadian, queer, and gender non-binary tenor Mike Zuming Fan | 范祖铭 (they) possesses a warm full lyric instrument with impressive power, agility, and range. Mike makes their Pacific Opera Victoria début as a 2021-2022 Young Artist in the Civic Engagement Quartet, filming a gender-bending digital recital Tā (她 / 他) as well appearances and performances in the Victoria community. Polymath and polyglot, Mike has performed in 10 languages for audiences across Canada, USA, Europe, and Australia. A passionate, committed, and innovative performer, Mike is strongly committed to social justice as the Artistic Director of Opéra Queens.
Rebecca Gray is a soprano, composer and improviser based in Toronto passionate about performing and creating fresh, complex and inclusive new works. A graduate of the University of Toronto Opera School, she appeared as Donna Elvira in University of Toronto’s Don Giovanni (2017), performed the titular role in Prima Zombie: the diva that wouldn’t stay dead (2017) and premiered the lead in Pomegranate (2019) with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. She has performed with Esprit Orchestra, Tapestry Opera, Opera Q, FAWN, and has developed several chamber music recitals with her colleagues in the new music community. Rebecca’s compositions have been performed by musically diverse ensembles, including Ottawa’s 13 strings, the Capital Chamber Choir, and Ensemble Paramirabo. She has a particular interest in interdisciplinary work and has presented collaborative projects at Nuit Rose, the Montreal Contemporary Music Lab, the Toronto Creative Music lab, the Atlantic Music Festival, and the Banff Centre. She participated in the Canadian League of Composer’s PIVOT mentorship program, which will culminate in a choral performance by Pro Coro in Edmonton, and participated in Soundstreams’ Young Composer Workshop in 2021.
June 6
Beth Kope gratefully lives, works and creates in Victoria, the traditional territories of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples.
She is the author of three books of poetry. Falling Season, Leaf Press, 2010 detailed with sensitivity her mother’s loss of self due to an aggressive form of dementia called Lewy Body. Average Height of Flight, Caitlin Press 2015, gathered poems meditating on west coast landscape, grief and wonderment. Her recent book, Atlas of Roots, Caitlin Press, 2021 examines issues of adoption, trauma and identity
Her work has been described as honest, quietly stunning, and offering deep meditative space.
June 9 & 18
Marlene Grand Maître’s chapbook, Cancer’s Rogue Season, was published by Frog Hollow Press in April 2020. Her poetry has won prizes, and appeared in many literary journals. Work has also been published in ten anthologies, most recently in Refugium: Poems For The Pacific (Caitlin, 2017), Sweet Water: Poems For The Watersheds (Caitlin, 2020), Voicing Suicide (Ekstasis, 2020), and Worth More Standing (Caitlin, 2022) She can be heard reading her work on Planet Earth Poetry’s online Poets’ Caravan. Marlene has lived in Esquimalt for 25 years, on the unceded traditional territory of the Esquimalt and Songhees nations.
Countertenor Ryan McDonald is thrilled to be joining Pacific Opera Victoria’s Civic Engagement Quartet. A recent Encouragement Award winner from the Metropolitan Opera National Council Audition, Ryan McDonald has been seen on stage as Athamas in Handel’s Semele, First Witch and Spirit in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, L’enfant in Ravels L’enfant et les sortilèges, Cupid in John Blow’s Venus and Adonis and Jack in Sondheim’s Into the Woods.
June 2 & 10
Author of 21 books of poetry, fiction, biography, memoir and translation, Terese Svoboda has won the Guggenheim, the Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Poetry Prize, an NEH translation grant, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation video prize, the O. Henry Award for the short story, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay. Her opera WET premiered at L.A.’s Disney Hall. A graduate of UBC, she has lived in Victoria for the last three years. Her most recent book, Theatrix: Poetry Plays was named one of the best of 2021, and two novels are forthcoming: Roxy and Coco and Dog on Fire. Recent work has focused on the transparency of nature.
Yarrow Collective is a collaboration between a group of settlers who are artists, performance activists, community activators, backyard gardeners, and a certified bee steward. In learning to be good visitors on this land, we seek to disrupt colonial, extractive assumptions around what ‘gardening’ is and imagine what it can be. Shaped by those who tend them, our participatory gardening installations have been popping up around Victoria as part of SKAMpede, FernFest, Fairfield Fall Fair, Play Streets, and the AGGV’s Family Sunday. Yarrow Collective is honoured to be part of Voices in Nature and to be working with Pacific Opera Victoria for the first time.
We pay our respects to the traditional keepers of this land, the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking people, now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. The loss of bee and plant habitat in this territory are a direct result of colonization and stolen land. Yarrow Collective partners with local community groups to steward future pollinator gardens and to learn from those who are healing the land.
POLLINATORS
A participatory gardening installation that playfully invites urban humans to explore our shared role in stewarding ecosystems. This fun, drop-in activity is a chance to discover Indigenous wildflowers and the bees they provide habitat for. Learn how to make ‘seed balls’: nutrient packed balls of clay, compost, and wildflower seeds, and how they can be used to create thriving bee habitats in your own backyard. Guided by song, journey through the installation spiral, choose where to plant, and contemplate what we are seeding for the future. Suitable for all ages.
