Author of the article:
Stephan Bonfield
Publishing date:
July 6, 2019 • 7 minute read
Silent Light opened at Banff Centre’s Margaret Greenham Theatre this weekend to sold-out performances packed with audiences keenly expecting something different from Joel Ivany’s adventurously curated Opera in the 21st Century program. Their anticipation was rewarded with a stirring new opera based on the film Stellet Licht by Carlos Reygadas about a Mennonite community in northern Mexico. The film won a Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and became a worthy subject for a Banff Centre adaptation as a sung stage-work.
If you’re looking for some sort of Mennonite controversy cast in the same ilk as Miriam Toews’ Women Talking, her fictionalized account about the horrible events which took place at a different colony in Bolivia, Silent Light refreshingly takes a very different path away from such shocking narratives.
