Hearing Voices

ONE PERFORMANCE ONLY – Friday, June 30, 2023 at 7:30 p.m. | Vancouver Playhouse Theatre (600 Hamilton Street, Vancouver)

Astrolabe Musik Theatre, in partnership with Allegra Chamber Orchestra, is proud to announce the North American première of UK composer Jocelyn Pook’s Hearing Voices.

Hearing Voices is presented as part of Allegra Chamber Orchestra’s 2023 festivELLE, a two-day celebration of women-identifying composers and artists, June 29-30.

Extraordinarily beautiful and intimate, Hearing Voices gives voice to individual experiences of mental illness through a series of women embodied by a single singer. Particularly personal for Pook—whose own family has been touched by mental illness over three generations—Hearing Voices features recorded testimony and writings from her friends, artists Bobby Baker and Julie McNamara; her great-aunt Phyllis Williams and mother Mary Pook; and seamstress Agnes Richter, an inmate in a German asylum in the 1890s, who covered her jacket with densely embroidered text.