The Haiku Project

For 200 days during COVID lockdowns, I created elaborate daily art projects based on the meditative art of haiku: time-lapse videos, songs, puppets, epic long-form linked haiku, and many, many craft projects. The full project can be seen on Instagram.

PERFORMANCE PROJECTS

Creating and Performing Music & Theatre

A fully staged solo theatre show, co-created with director Sean Guist, based on my words and music. The Book of My Shames has been presented all over Canada over the last five years in cabaret, chamber, and orchestral arrangements.

“Broke my heart wide open with the pure honesty, raw vulnerability and humanity of it.” — Audience response

Solo Theatre Show

The Book of My Shames

The Human Voice
Translation/Adaptation

My English adaptation of Poulenc’s La voix humaine, set in a shuttered theatre during COVID, was commissioned for a City Opera Vancouver semi-staged film in 2020. The translation has since been performed in Norway and Seattle.

“Bell’s finely tuned performance is so perfectly married to his own sensitive and intelligent adaptation that the viewer is irrevocably drawn into the unfolding of this intensely personal drama.” — Opera Canada

Banned from
the Concert Hall
Bawdy Pub Show

This wild project, commissioned by Victoria Baroque, has already been brought back twice by popular demand. I built it for colleagues Benjamin Butterfield and Timothy Carter (tenors) and Mark McDonald (harpsichord). It’s based around the bawdy songs of Henry Purcell and his contemporaries, and features new music that shares the same depraved sensibility.

I have never experienced so much laughter at a Classical music event…

The Traveller
Hybrid Recital

Schumann’s Liederkreis, op. 39 is interwoven with folk songs, art songs, and my original music. It’s a carefully constructed, colourful, intimate through-composed piece (just over an hour long) that works beautifully in small halls — we’ve done this as a house concert, and at concert series in Tennessee, Montreal, Alberta, and B.C.

The Small Rain
Hybrid Recital

A fusion of poetry and music created for Early Music Vancouver’s lockdown programming, this wide-ranging reflection on our human relationship to “nature” was the subject of a deep dive in the Sparks and Wiry Cries magazine. Eva Stone-Barney writes that the piece “maximizes the potential of the recital to do something challenging and unconventional.”

Cocktales with Maria
Drag Art Song Cycle

Maria Toilette (aka Joel Klein) collected these stories herself, in the field: stories of the love lives and sex lives of her queer friends. I then set them to music as cabaret-inspired art songs, and the raunchiest, draggiest “opera” show ever was born.

“It is the most beautiful camp thing I’ve ever seen. I loved it. I loved it. And it is so touching, not just funny.”
— Sky Gilbert