Daniel Cabena & Luke Hathaway
artistic directors
Daniel Cabena is a concert singer, recitalist, chamber musician, and singing actor, performing music from the medieval to the contemporary. He is also a curator of texts and music; and with Luke Hathaway he shares the artistic direction of ANIMA. Together they program concerts and commission new works of text and music. To this work he brings a background in early music and liturgical music scholarship and a commitment to exploring how music functions in different performance contexts and traditions, a commitment to the ‘why’ of music and to its ‘how.’
Daniel is also a practitioner of the teacherly arts. He teaches vocal pedagogy & early music history and works with singers, one-on-one and in groups, at Wilfrid Laurier University and at the Beckett School at Laurier, the community-integrated wing of WLU’s Faculty of Music. He leads the Beckett School’s Community Consort, a multi-instrumental, multidisciplinary community of practice and curiosity that explores how early music was new when it was new and how it means today.
Daniel’s singing and teaching are informed by the Alexander Technique, in which movement education field he is a teacher-trainee. He also makes music with his hands, playing modern and Baroque violin and viola as well as vièle and recorders.
Luke Hathaway is a trans poet, librettist, and theatre maker who lives in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, where he teaches English literature and creative writing at Saint Mary’s University. His mythopoeic word-worlds have given rise to new choral works by Colin Labadie, James Rolfe, and Zachary Wadsworth, and to the folk opera the sign of jonas, a collaboration with Benton Roark. He is the author of four collections of poetry, one of which — Years, Months, and Days — was named a Best Book of the Year in the New York Times. His most recent collection, The Affirmations (‘a trans-mystical work of love and change’), is published by Biblioasis.
Luke works with Daniel Cabena as co-artistic director of ANIMA, to create and commission new texts and music inspired by early music sources. He mentors emerging librettists as a faculty member for the Amadeus Choir’s Choral Composition Lab.
Other current and/or recent collaborations include: the opera Eurydice Fragments (with Roark/Arkora and Debi Wong/re:naissance opera); the audio-visual album Ghosts (with the art collective Thirtyminutes); the theatre work This Is Not Safe (with GaRRy Williams / DaPoPo Theatre and Alexa Bella Katya); and A Passion Retold, a queer, bardic retelling of Bach’s Johannes-Passion (with Daniel Cabena/ANIMA).
Paul Genyk-Berezowsky
collaborating artist
Paul Genyk-Berezowsky is a versatile performer and teacher based in Toronto. A strong believer in promoting positive change with music, Paul has organized concerts in support of causes including brain tumour research. Currently the founding music director of the Toronto Physicians Choir, Paul has in past seasons worked as Associate Conductor of the Pax Christi Chorale, Assistant Conductor of the Oakville Choral Society, and Director of the Junction Chorus, a choir for adults with intellectual disabilities.
As a recipient of the Ken Fleet Choral Conducting Scholarship, Paul guest conducted London Pro Musica in concert. From the other side of the podium, Paul has enjoyed lending his baritone voice to choirs such as the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, playing oboe with ensembles such as the Mississauga Symphony Orchestra, and performing as a classical guitarist for events and recitals.
He completed his degree in Music Education at the University of Toronto and has pursued further studies with some of North America’s leading conducting teachers.
Judith Souman
collaborating artist
Judith Souman has been active as a solo, chamber, and orchestral musician across Canada and the Netherlands. Her musical interests range from playing the medieval vielle and baroque viola to collaborating with contemporary composers and improvisers, and everything in between.
Her performances in recent years have included creating an experimental solo recital in the Dordrecht Summer Concerts, performing as a chamber musician in the Spirit of the North Classical Music Festival and the Talent Break concert series at de Doelen, and playing with the Kitchener Waterloo and Prince George Symphony Orchestras.
Judith is currently based in Waterloo, Ontario, where she is active as a performer and teacher. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Wilfrid Laurier University and a master’s degree from Codarts University for the Arts in Rotterdam. She studied primarily with Christine Vlajk and Karin Dolman, and has taken lessons with violists such as Nobuko Imai and Garth Knox. She studied historically informed performance with the Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Orchestra, the Nota Bene players, and with baroque cellist Job ter Haar.
Coco Collins
collaborating artist
Coco (Colleen) Collins is a Nova Scotia/ Mi’kma’ki-based interdisciplinary artist of Irish, French and Odawa descent, working in songwriting, performance, poetry, and visual arts.
She has worked as a gallery director, inforestry, fossil preparation, and renovation; as an autism support worker, teacher, and women’s shelter counsellor. Her writing, music, and art practice centers on temporality, presumptions of sentience, subversion, rhythm, gesture, geographies, biophonies, vibrations, the ouroboric, the peripatetic, love, and the polyglottic.
She studied writing and art at several universities; music through the Royal Conservatory, birds, and in dark bars across lands for years. Coco lives with animals, regret, appetite, gratitude, and in the pursuit of sympathetic resonance.
Karen Schindler
publisher
Karen Schindler is the publisher of Baseline Press, based out of London, ON. Since 2011, Baseline has been publishing Canadian poets in hand-sewn, limited edition chapbooks.
She has also worked as an engineer and educator, and served for ten years as director of the Antler River Reading Series (formerly Poetry London). A champion of her local arts community, present and past, her personal studies have included research on London’s female pioneer poets of the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
Karen's poetry and book reviews have appeared in journals including Canthius, The Malahat Review, and The Fiddlehead. In 2023, Gaspereau Press published her first chapbook of poems, The Sad Truth, as part of their Devil’s Whim Chapbook Series.
Claire Yurkovich
collaborating writer
Claire Yurkovich is a queer poet and scholar, currently working as a researcher in the fields of gender and sexuality, mental health, and 2SLGBTQ+ health. They are passionate about arts-based programming and archival work, specifically regarding queer cultures, belonging, and creating space and community for these stories to be told. Claire holds a Master’s degree in Women and Gender Studies from Saint Mary’s University, where her prior research examined how language and the written word can improve accessibility within mental health research and lend to a space of community and self-expression.