LEANNE SIMPSON, NICK FERRIO, TARA WILLIAMSON and SEAN CONWAY at the Music Gallery, Thursday, January 30. Rating: NNNN
There’s an art to pulling off an hour-long spoken word performance, and Leanne Simpson has mastered it. In St. George the Martyr church, otherwise known as the Music Gallery, an elder gave a blessing, Peterborough singer/songwriter Nick Ferrio played two winning tunes, and then the Peterborough author, activist and academic took over with short stories from her book, Islands Of Decolonial Love, reworked as spoken word poems and songs.
Engaging and conversational, she paced the set perfectly, beginning with the emotional title song that saw her joined by a four-piece band. (She and pianist/singer Tara Williamson harmonized beautifully.) The focus then moved to Simpson’s writing, sometimes unaccompanied, sometimes set to live or pre-recorded music.
Simpson’s ancestry is Mississauga Nishnaabeg, and her vivid stories explore the lives of modern-day indigenous people. Most powerful was Ishpadinaa – set against a pre-recorded track of Simpson singing a traditional women’s song – a story about recovering sacred bones beneath a cottage, set to an unsettling, jittering Tribe Called Red composition (Simpson called the group “our heroes”), and a languid, sensuous piece in which she imagines herself a salmon returning to Lake Ontario (which used to be full of them).
No one seemed ready for her to leave the stage, so it was somewhat of a comedown to have the night end with other musicians. Sean Conway, also of Peterborough, played a couple of original country tunes, and then Williamson shut things down with songs that swung between lounge, jazz, pop and musical theatre.
