Carol Ann Weaver and Rebecca Campbell are coming to Manitoba this coming week, bringing Paraguay home to many of its ‘roots’ in Manitoba next week! http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~caweaver/concert.html
• Thursday, Jan. 10, 11:30 AM – CMU, Laudamus Auditorium, Winnipeg
• Friday, Jan. 11, 10:00 AM AM – MCI auditorium, Gretna
• Friday, Jan. 11, 7:30 PM – Douglas Mennonite Church, Winnipeg (offering)
• Saturday, Jan. 12, 7:30 PM – Mennonite Heritage Village (the Museum), Steinbach ($10.00 admission)
• Sunday, Jan. 13, 2:00 PM – Altona Mennonite Church, Altona ($10.00 admission)
Paraguay Primeval by Carol Ann Weaver is a musical work featuring stories of Mennonites who fled to Paraguay from Russian and Canada in the 1920s and beyond. This January 2013 Manitoba tour takes this music to some of the very people who were born in Paraguay but have moved back to Canada.
Paraguay Primeval helps to tell the extraordinary story of Mennonites finding new “Promised Land” by moving to Paraguay from Canada in order to retain their own schools, and from Russia to flee the Bolshevik Revolution and the Stalinist regime. Once in Paraguay, these Mennonites settled in the “Green Hell” of the Chaco, suffering typhoid and other illnesses, but ever building colonies, growing crops, and maintaining livestock, while creating schools, churches, hospitals, and industries which lured back many indigenous peoples. The desert brought forth new life.
Weaver says about the work, “My brief visit to the Chaco, in July, 2009, following the Mennonite World Conference in Asuncion, Paraguay, was a moving experience. What stole my heart, while travelling to these colonies, was a sense of incredible dedication to this new land as voiced by these Mennonites in their strong singing. I was particularly struck by a statue of a woman behind a plow, representing women who had lost their husbands during Stalin years in Russia. Texts are derived from Rudy Wiebe’s Blue Mountains of China (with it’s vivid and poetically written Paraguayan sections), Dora Dueck’s Under The Still Standing Sun, and Henry and Esther Regehr’s translated Schoenbrunn Chronicles, compiled by Agnes Balzer and Lieselotte Dueck and written by Paraguayan Mennonite settlers. Basic journal entries (in Schoenbrunn Chronicles) yield starkly perfect lyrics, especially those recounting deaths in the Harms family, or adventures of Uncle Hans in the well.”
Carol Ann Weaver is an eclectic composer, pianist, writer, and music professor at Conrad Grebel University College/University of Waterloo whose music has been heard throughout North America, in Europe, Africa, Korea and Paraguay. She has produced seven CDs and tours extensively with Rebecca, often doing African or Mennonite-themed music. She previously taught at WLU, at [then] MBBC in Winnipeg, and at EMU in Virginia. Rebecca Campbell is one of the most evocative, exquisite vocalists in Canada who has toured and recorded extensively with Jane Siberry, Three Sheets to the Wind, and many others. Her CDs receive high critical acclaim.