Sankofa: The Soldier's Tale Retold - a deal with the devil
26 Oct 2024 - Photos by John Lauener

Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale is intriguing snippets of modern classical music combined with a theatrical fable. The Art of Time Ensemble and Against The Grain Theatre decided to present the glorious sonics and to overhaul the libretto/text to give it a contemporary relevance to match the timeless music. The libretto was given to poet Titilope Sonuga, who turns the fable of a deal with the devil into a meditation on the madness of war and the horrors of racism. While the results never quite gell, each is mesmerizing and director Tawiah M'Carthy (Here Lies Henry, Sizwe Banzi is Dead, Maanomaa My Brother, Obaaberima, Black Boys) ties everything together with visual flourishes and as much movement as is allowed with a seven piece mini orchestra in the center of the stage. Full advantage is taken of the soaring ceilings and endless staircases of the Harbourfront Centre Theatre to both keep the cast in motion and to convey the crushing magnitude of history and man's inhumanity. 

Ordena Stephens-Thompson (Harlem Duet) is our regal narrator and she is a grounded but ethereal presence as she glides across the stage and up and down the stairs. The rhyming couplets are delivered with precision and clarity with only occasional slips into sing song when the effort to make a rhyme defeats. While Stephens-Thompson is a goddess gracing us with her wisdom, Olaoluwa Faokun as the soldier goes from youthful idealism to bitter and broken. The change is not just in demeanour, an athletic possession/dance section leaves him physically changed with a limp that grows with each stair climbed. Diego Matamoros (Rosmersholm, A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, Post-Democracy, Little Menace, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, The Royale) is a playful Devil, deceptively sweet in old lady drag, who becomes terrifying as he takes on the mantle of a general. Why just toy with one soul when there is massive carnage to be created? The necklace in the shape of a Sankofa bird that protects the soldier, seems not to terribly concern the Devil who doesn't even bother to get his magic fiddle back in the trade. The destruction of the soldier is enough fun and the trinket is returned.

Through most of the dialogue/monologues, the orchestra sits quiet. Occasionally violinist Julia Mirzoev is called on to comment or incarnate the fiddle's tones. But when the music takes centre stage, the ensemble shines. The score is a mildly dissonant fusion of martial music mixed with tangos, ragtime and pre-recorded primal drum beats. One's ear darts from idea to idea, catching onto phrases and fragments of melody. Alas the musical component is too fractured and short-lived to either soar or dig under one's skin, it becomes Stravinsky by way of Carl Stalling. All is in service of Sonuga's words, and when she evokes images of "blood travels" or bluntly demonstrates the racial inequality, the words resonate. But there are also clunkers—"if a black man learns the art of war/all oppression would end forevermore"—where the forced rhyme defeats the idea. Though the cast makes the words sing, they don't have the operatic option of melody to gild the words and connect them into the music's pulse. Two fascinating explorations that never quite intertwine.