Our scholar this week is Aoife O’Higgins, former Postgraduate Research Associate at the oRANGE Lab (University of Oxford), and today Director of Research at What Works for Children's Social Care whose aim is to seek better outcomes for children, young people and families by bringing the best available evidence to practitioners and other decision makers across the children’s social care sector. She says: “Thanks to a generous grant from the Canada-UK Foundation, I was able to visit Canada in May 2018 to discuss the findings and implications of my PhD work."

"My PhD research examined the poor educational outcomes of children who are unable to safely live with their parents and are therefore looked after by the state (children in care). I completed a systematic review of the existing evidence on the factors associated with poor educational outcomes as well as an empirical analysis of the ways in which carers are involved with and support the education of children in care. This analysis was carried out using data collected by a research team at the University of Ottawa. The main findings indicate that foster and kinship carers’ high aspirations predict the future school performance of teenagers in care."

The main findings indicate that foster and kinship carers’ high aspirations predict the future school performance of teenagers in care. This analysis was carried out using data collected by a research team at the University of Ottawa.

"This visit was particularly welcome both by me and my Canadian partners for two reasons. Firstly, I had visited in 2014 to discuss the use of their data on children in care and when I applied for access to the data I made a commitment to return to present my findings. Secondly, as the data I analysed pertains to children in foster and kinship care in Ontario, the findings and implications are particularly relevant to research, practice and policy there."

"The grant allowed me to maintain and further develop a strong partnership with researchers at the University of Ottawa, which has resulted in co-authored publications. We also have several ongoing projects which we hope to take forward and turn into larger international research collaborations."

Canadian Flare. Three Canadian features and two shorts are among the programme of BFI Flare, the LGBTIQ+ Film Festival which runs from 17 to 28 March. Celebrating its 35th year as well as its 2nd entirely-online edition, Flare has made all shorts free to anyone in the UK. Additionally with Five Films for Freedom, the festival has created the largest global LGBTIQ+ digital campaign sharing 5 short films that will be available to watch free from anywhere in the world. See BFI Flare website for all details and to purchase limited tickets.

Among the free shorts, there are 2 Canadian offerings. Hello, Goodbye directed, produced and co-written by Sarah Rotella is a wordless 4-minute recounting of the start and end of a relationship between two women. And a differently-told story of the connection between two women, Girls Shouldn’t Walk Alone at Night written and directed by Montreal-based Katerine Martineau, the final instalment of a trilogy starring actress Amaryllis Tremblay.

The 3 Canadian feature films in this year’s edition of Flare are all creating buzz. First, the documentary picked as one of Canada’s Top Ten feature films of 2020 by the Toronto International Film Festival, No Ordinary Man tells the story of jazz musician Billy Tipton whose transgender identity was only revealed after his death. The film is co-directed by Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt (who is also an assistant professor of gender studies at the University of Victoria).

The debut feature film from Shana Myara (seen above, centre), Well Rounded celebrates “fat and fierce babes” in Canada using creativity to counter diet culture. Featuring Uganda-born model/stylist/writer Lydia Okello, daring burlesque performer Ivory, as well as Indigiqueer comic Candy Palmater, the film blends live interviews with animation to great acclaim.

The international premiere of the film Jump, Darling, takes centre stage with regards to attention (and is unfortunately sold out!). It stars the late Cloris Leachman (who steals the show at 94-years-old) and Thomas Duplessie as grandmother and grandson at crossroads (seen together below). The feature written and directed by debut filmmaker Phil Connell brings together family drama and drag culture while addressing themes of mental health.

Cecilia Livingston, Canadian composer and Glyndebourne artist-in-residence. With Glyndebourne Festival Opera ticket sales opening later this month, we are delighted to bring you a great interview with Glyndebourne artist-in-residence, Toronto's Cecilia Livingston. Holder of a PhD in music from University of Toronto, and a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Kings College London, Cecilia is respected as as one of Canada's most important young composers. She specialises in music for voice, and her projects often tell women’s stories, inviting audiences to reconsider familiar literary and historical characters. Her music is driven by melody, mixing styles, from minimalism to jazz, to create work that is both lyrical and unsettling.

Cecilia’s residency at Glyndebourne is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and builds on her 2015-17 Fellowship at The American Opera Project in New York. Winner of the Mécénat Musica Prix 3 Femmes for female opera creators in Canada, her music has been heard at Nuit Blanche, Bang on a Can’s Summer Festival, Soundstreams, Fashion Art Toronto, Tapestry Opera, and with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Kingston Symphony, and Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra.

Her opera ‘Singing Only Softly’ was nominated for two 2020 Dora Mavor Moore Awards for theatre (including Outstanding New Opera), and her harp and vibraphone duo ‘Garden’ features among nods for 2020 JUNO Classical Album of the Year: Solo or Chamber.

We were delighted when Cecilia began to follow our Friday Files, and even more delighted she agreed to a virtual interview, which we share with you today.

What does being Canadian bring to your career overall and particularly to your Glyndebourne experience?
People I meet, particularly in Europe, have such positive ideas of Canada and are so excited to ask questions about life ‘over there.’ This makes me proud to represent our country, and I think the collaborative open mindedness I bring to projects is grounded in my Canadian-ness.

Because I trained in music in Canada, and then immediately took up a fellowship at The American Opera Project in New York, I come to Glyndebourne with a two-part North American perspective. I’m fascinated by different ways of making opera on these two sides of the ocean, and what kinds of work get made. It reveals how closely-related cultures value the arts differently, which is reflected in things like funding processes, visa applications, union regulations, elementary school education, etc.

I’m fascinated by different ways of making opera on these two sides of the ocean, and what kinds of work get made.

You’ve talked several times about being mentored by Steve Reich, and what you’ve learned both from an artistic and business sense about developing yourself and your career. How do you think this mentoring added value to your own education and development, and do you wish there had been anything different about it?
I was lucky to study with Steve Reich twice, when I was a fellow at Bang on a Can’s Summer Institute (in the US), and a couple of years later at Soundstreams’ Emerging Composer Workshop (in Toronto). His ‘Music for 18 Musicians’ is my desert island piece, the work that I come back to when I need to recharge. I got to study with Reich at two pivotal moments when my own sense of vocation and artistic vision were being tested. It was extraordinary to learn from a composer who has developed such a clear creative identity, and has sustained that through a long career – finding creative growth and renewal across a lifetime.

What advice would you give to a young music student studying today?
When I talk with music students, I emphasise that we have to complement excellence in musical craft with entrepreneurial skills. Unfortunately, many music programs at universities and conservatoires still neglect this. So there can be an uncomfortable period for young artists, in which they have to skill up very quickly to run a career that supports their practice. Professionalising as an artist is, in effect, starting your own business, even if you find management. I encourage students to look carefully at the musicians they admire, but also the careers they admire. For example, I suggest students listen to how those artists speak about their work: for musicians especially, how we talk about our music and how we represent it visually online is hugely important to how our practice is perceived, and this is something that can take quite a while for each of us to figure out and get comfortable with.

How has COVID impacted your musical inspiration? What inspires you in the world today?
Initially, the lockdowns did offer a period of quiet to finish already-contracted work. Just days before the first lockdown in London, Canadian poet Anne Michaels sent me the texts for our song cycle for Women on the Verge. I know that I drew on both the sudden quiet and the emotional intensity of those months to create this piece, ‘Breath Alone’ – it might be best thing I’ve ever written. Anne’s luminous texts for this are some of the best poetry I’ve ever read, and working with her poetry called on the deep concentration that is composition’s most serious joy. That said, her texts for ‘Breath Alone’ are emotionally complex, with real moral weight; living inside that project, in such a period of global stress and grief, was challenging to say the least.

COVID has been shattering for the performing arts. As the year has unfolded it’s been very difficult to sustain creative energy and tenacity, as one opportunity after another disappears. But one of the things about being a professional artist is knowing how to do exactly that, even when inspiration is worn threadbare by circumstance.

For me, other artists and other art are my inspiration: connecting with performers I’m creating for, coming back to works (like Music for 18!) that get my creative mind humming. So I’ve been coming back to Reich, Radiohead, Anne’s poetry and novels, the theatre and dance works of Crystal Pite… But I’m profoundly concerned about what happens next for our sector, when we’re ‘back to normal’. I don’t know what normal can be, with the financial impact on the performing arts we are only beginning to understand. COVID won’t be the end of opera, but it has imperilled an entire generation of performers and creators.

What’s next for you after your residency at Glyndebourne?
In this final year of my residency at Glyndebourne I’m also completing a big project in Canada: ‘Terror & Erebus ’, about the final days of the Franklin Expedition to the Arctic, and is being co-produced by Toronto’s Opera 5 and TorQ Percussion Quartet. I’ve relished bringing the sound world of percussion to opera; it has opened up so many dramatic possibilities for this extraordinary story of courage and hubris and endurance.

Thanks to COVID, we’re planning the studio recording ahead of the live premiere – not the usual order-of-operations! So the live premiere will, COVD-willing, be right around the time my residency at Glyndebourne concludes. After that, I’ve got a couple of wonderful commissions on the books, though I can’t talk about them yet! And I’ve just joined the roster at Stratagem Artists in New York, so watch out for what we develop together!

In our spotlight this week is Ms. Stefanie Beck, Acting High Commissioner of Canada to the United Kingdom. Ms. Beck assumes the lead Canada House role on an interim basis following the departure of previous High Commissioner Janice Charette, who returned to Ottawa in early March as Interim Clerk of the Privy Council.

In both diplomatic and senior government positions, Stefanie has been in leadership roles on some of the most complex and challenging issues facing Canada and the global community. Prior to joining Canada House as Deputy High Commissioner in October 2020, Stefanie served as Assistant Secretary to Cabinet, Priorities and Planning at Canada's Privy Council office. She led work on overall government priority setting and policy development, including through the COVID crisis, and through transitions to new mandates. She has also served as Assistant Deputy Minister in several Canadian government departments, including Global Affairs Canada, and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). During her time at IRCC, she was part of the team leading the successful Syrian refugee operation there.

She first joined Global Affairs (External Affairs, as it was known then) in 1990 and has served as Ambassador to Cambodia and later to Croatia, in addition to time in political roles in Canadian diplomacy in Senegal and Australia.

Stefanie went to school in Guyana, Jamaica, Canada, and Singapore. She then went to McGill to study English literature, but after first year, spent the summer travelling across Europe by train and on foot with her best friends! She was frustrated by not being able to communicate with everyone, so when she came back to Montreal in the fall, she switched to studying Modern Languages: German and Italian. However, despite speaking decent German, Italian, and Spanish, in addition to, of course, French and English, she was never posted to the countries where those languages are the maternal tongue! As she shared with us, "Goes to show that a good degree in anything will get you everywhere!"

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