Adanya Dunn via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Adanya Dunn:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Adanya Dunn
- City: Toronto
- Country: Canada
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Canadian-Bulgarian soprano Adanya Dunn, critically acclaimed for her performance as Musetta in Against the Grain Theatre’s English “transladaptation” of Puccini’s La bohème, was noted by Definitely The Opera as the “revelation of the evening”, while Opera Going Toronto marked her as a “sultry soprano red hot and alluring.” For the 2016/2017, Adanya joined the Rebanks Family Fellowship & International Performance Residency Program at Glenn Gould School where she studied with Monica Whicher.
In June and July 2017, Adanya appeared as the title role in CHARLOTTE: A Tri-Coloured Play with Music, a new genre-bending chamber musical based on the life and artwork of the German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943). The show premiered as part of Toronto’s Luminato Festival and again in Taipei, Taiwan at the World Stage Design Scenofest, where Adanya made her Asian debut.
An exciting collaboration between Against the Grain Theatre and the Toronto International Film Festival led to her performing with pianist Topher Mokrzewski in excerpts of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire as part the pre-concert to the first ever Toronto retrospective of one of the most important and influential filmmaking teams in cinema history, “Not Reconciled: The Films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet” (Moses und Aron), of which their performance was a noted as “a qualified success” (Barcza Blog).
An alumna of the University of Toronto (UofT), Adanya studied with Professor Lorna MacDonald for both her Master of Music in Opera Performance and Bachelor of Music in Voice Performance degrees. Within her studies, she had the opportunity to work with artists such as Sandra Horst, Nathalie Paulin, Russell Braun, Michael Albano, and Che Anne Loewen. While at the Opera School, she sang roles such as Mlle Silberklang (Der Schauspieldirekor), The Governess (The Turn of the Screw), and Miss Wordsworth (Albert Herring), and premiered three different contemporary operas by composition students.
In May 2016, Adanya graduated from Bard College Conservatory’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program, led by Artistic Directors Dawn Upshaw and Kayo Iwama, and studying with Patricia Misslin and Edith Bers. Through Bard, she performed at the Morgan Library in NYC, the Longy School of Music in Boston, the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Sosnoff Theater in the Hudson Valley, and a debut with the Albany Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Allen Miller singing First Lady in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Adanya sang the soprano solo in Handel’s Messiah under the baton of Leon Botstein with The Orchestra Now; performed in an operatic double bill as Papagena in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and the New York State Premiere of Oliver Knussen’s Higglety Pigglety Pop! in the soprano lead, Rhoda.
In January 2015, Adanya made her Carnegie Hall debut as part of Marilyn Horne’s The Song Continues, where she “took the stage with a wonderful relaxed stage presence and delighted the audience with her engaging personality” (Vocedimeche). Adanya was a Voice Fellow for two years at the Music Academy of the West (MAW) helmed by iconic mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne. At MAW she Adanya performed the role of Clorinda in Rossini’s La Cenerentola directed by David Paul and conducted by Jayce Ogren. There, she also performed in opera scenes directed by Bruce Donnell: Frantik (The Cunning Little Vixen) and Valencienne (Die lustige Witwe). The previous year, she covered the role of Frasquita in Bizet’s Carmen and performed in opera scene excerpts directed by Gregory Fortner, as Marzelline (Fidelio by Beethoven) and Elvira (L’italiana in Algeri) conducted by John Fisher and Warren Jones, respectively. Adanya also premiered the chamber song cycle we do it to one another by cellist-composer Joshua Roman, and had the opportunity to work with Marilyn Horne, Fred Carama, Martin Katz, John Churchwell, Anthony Dean Griffey, Nino Sanikidze, and Denise Massé.
Adanya has won an Encouragement Award from the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions (Buffalo-Toronto District) and was a finalist at the Eckhardt Gramatté Competition in May 2017. Adanya won a Top Graduate Award from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music and is a two-time long-term grant recipient for Professional Musicians from the Canada Council for the Arts.
With support of the Canadian Aldeburgh Foundation, she attended the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme, Aldeburgh Music Festival in June 2012, studying with soprano Dawn Upshaw and pianist Kayo Iwama in England. Past development programs include Highlands Opera Studio, Banff Centre’s Opera in the 21st Century Program, Opera NUOVA, Toronto Summer Music Festival, Tapestry Opera 101, Vancouver International Song Institute, Orford Arts Centre and Academy, and Opera Atelier Professional Training Program. Adanya has had the pleasure of coaching with Richard Margison, Renate Rohlfing, Lucy Shelton, John Fisher, Marilyn Horne, Cameron Stowe, Warren Jones, and Philip Morehead.
The fall was full of ground-breaking music by Canadian composers. With the Highlands Opera Studio, Adanya performed in the semi-staged workshop performance of Mishaabooz’s Realm, an important new work combining opera and First Nations singers and instrumentalists, by Cree composer Andrew Balfour. With Soundstreams, Adanya was the soprano soloist in the 70-minute theatrical realization of the music by Quebecois composer Claude Vivier (1948-1983) including Musik für das Ende (The Music of the End) and Do you Believe in the Immortality of the Soul? at Crow’s Theatre in Toronto. These were the world premiere of the first staged production of these pieces comprised of 10 intercultural singers bringing together diverse styles and heritages in a ritual journey through life, through death, and beyond.
Adanya’s passion for innovative and genre-bending projects led her to pursue roles in both the contemporary and traditional classical spheres. She is a resident performer with the interdisciplinary arts collective FAWN Chamber Creative collaborating with composers, artists, writers, and performers, in creating and producing new works. Adanya is the Co-Artistic Director of and core performer with The Happenstancers, a chamber music concert series she developed with her colleagues Brad Cherwin (clarinet) and Nahre Sol (piano). Featuring guest artists, visual media, and creative programming, the series is currently in its second season.
Upcoming projects the world premiere of Synesthesia IV – Pandora, a triple bill of Opera-Ballets by three different Canadian composers that emerged through a collective creation method and improvisation with FAWN; a workshop with Soundstreams; a residency with ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble) at the Banff Centre this summer; and some funky psychedelic-electro-improv-opera-esque creations in Europe and beyond.
Contact Information
- Email: adanya [at] adanyadunn [dot] com
- Contact by Webpage: http://adanyadunn.com/contact/
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Twitter: AddyDear
- ▶ Instagram: adanyad
- ▶ Website: http://adanyadunn.com
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
AYRE: An Evening of Osvaldo Golijov
Against the Grain Theatre / Aga Khan Museum at the Ismaili Centre, Toronto
“[…] inhabited the sweet, passionate world of Golijov’s writing for voice with real conviction.“
– Robert Harris, THE GLOBE & MAIL
“Lúa Descolorida […] sung by soloist Adanya Dunn with simple, shining grace, provides much-needed catharsis.”
– Ian Ritchie, OPERA GOING TORONTO
Dunn’s voice handled the extreme range and colours covered in the piece beautifully. […] you were so transfixed“
– Gregory Finney, SCHMOPERA
Clips (more may be added)
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging from New Orleans to Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... through Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
