On Friday, August 25th, send + receive concludes our Alleyways series with a special screening of Tom-Tom—a 1932 opera by Shirley Graham Du Bois, produced by Arts in the Margins and directed by Julie Richard. Join us at 8pm, in the covered alleyway between Albert Street and Arthur Street, for this free and entirely outdoor event.

Perhaps the first opera ever written by a Black women, Tom-Tom had faded into the mists of time until the score’s rediscovery in 2001. In the first Canadian production of Tom-Tom, this monumental work, moving from Africa to a slave plantation to Harlem in the 1920s, takes its proper place as both an important piece of music and a touchstone in the history of Black American creativity. Under the artistic direction of Julie Richard, a Haitian-Canadian composer, musician and historian of Black women composers, Tom-Tom receives a new and reimagined staging, bringing it into dialogue with contemporary aspect of the Black experience, and revealing its distinctive artistic qualities.

Shirley Graham Du Bois can rightly be considered a 20th century Renaissance woman in an era when so many doors were closed to women of color in the United States. While she may be most known for her late-in-life marriage to civil rights activist and historian W.E.B. Du Bois, Graham Du Bois advanced civil rights and the arts in multiple countries and authored an opera, numerous plays, and many biographies that illuminated the Black experience in America. She is considered an integral figure in Black theatre and a cherished defender of human rights throughout the world.

Julie Richard is a classically trained composer and musician with expertise in various musical genres, including jazz, experimental, and African music. She has performed extensively across North America and internationally. Committed to preserving the legacy of forgotten Black composers has inspired her to form the Black Ark Orchestra and Les Angles Mortes.

Les Angles Mortes is a Montreal-based ensemble directed by Julie Richard, which rehabilitates marginalized works of classical music produced by African-American women. The goal is to recover, update and revalue what remains of these compositions so that they are not forgotten, so that they can finally enter into conversation with the history of contemporary music.