Women from Space 2025
Women From Space 2025
March 7-9
Toronto, Canada
Review by Ken Waxman
Photos by Susan O’Connor
Having reached its lucky seven integer, Toronto’s Women From Space (WFS) festival stretched the boundaries of innovative performances still further this year. Always open to varied types of experimentation, 2025’s participants seemed to focus as much on dance/movement, forms of vocalization and electronic programming as instrumental improvisation. With all concerts taking place within the specific spatial configurations of Toronto’s specially and colorfully decorated downtown west The Music Gallery, a mixture of Canadian and international players were also featured.
To get an idea of WFS 2025’s widening scope, compare the Free Jazz creativity of California-based pianist Myra Melford’s Fire and Water trio, which impressed during the final set on the festival’s closing night, with the acapella vocalization on US composer Meara O’Reilly’s Hockets For Two Voices performed by the duo of American Linnea Sablosky and Canadian-in-Los Angeles Mingjia Chen which began that evening.
Including German tenor saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and New York drummer Lesley Mok, the improvising on Fire and Water was as incendiary as the first part of its title, and flowed with the symmetry of the title’s second half. Starting with flashing fingers and clever comping, the pianist connected with the drummer’s pops and ruffs as the saxophonist began to slur out a harsh theme. With quick tongue stops, stuttering scoops and altissimo cries. Laubrock’s staccato timbres soon brought out responsive prestissimo clanks and note clusters from Melford as the saxophonist and pianist tossed the exposition back and forth.
Torque eventually gave way to tenderness as the other players relaxed into a processional line with Mok’s buzzing rebounds and gong-like taps propelled as she switched from sticks to mallets to brushes and palms, underlining the regenerated exposition. While subsequent reed-tongue stops and keyboard fist-banging intensified the narrative, Melford repeatedly emphasized certain patterns to signal brief tutti sequences. Each motif concluded, single players continued with solo explorations.
In the pianist’s case this involved vibrating items on her instrument’s inner strings or at one point stealthily inserting a child-like round into her solo as she improvised. Meanwhile, the saxophonist projected tough snores and yelps while the drummer repeatedly emphasized paradiddles and ruffs plus subsequent drum-top popping. Brought back for a brief encore, the trio’s moderated collection of slaps, honks, and clips further emphasized its meeting of rhythm and reflection.
Alone behind two microphones, vocalists Sablosky and Chen altered their pitches among alto, mezzo and soprano as they twisted their lyrical tessiture to follow the hockets and advances of O’Reilly’s compositions, one of which was originally written for two flutes.
Throughout their set, one singer at a time sang lead while the other decorated the evolving melody with high-pitched bel canto motifs. The wordless songs soared and descended during the set, with the two occasionally adding yelps, sighs, yodels and aviary chirps to monosyllabic oohs and ahs.
Although most sound motifs were reminiscent of classic motets, there were sections among the murmurs and hums that evoked rustic folk ballads, as well as a chant that was a close cousin to the hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers”.
A different integration of instrumental and vocal sounds was offered by New York violinist/singer yuniya edi kwon as the middle set of WFS’s second evening.
That night the Music Gallery’s concert area was rearranged so that chairs and floor blankets surrounded a circular performance space. While not a dancer like some earlier performers kwon, clad in long flowing garments, moved in circles around the space as she bowed long glissandi and concise jabs from her instrument.
A sudden outburst of aggressive basso vocalizing eventually shattered the formerly placid mood. From that point on kwon interspersed harsh spiccato strokes and sul tasto pacing from the fiddle with falsetto yelps, bel canto melodies, elliptical lyrics in English and other languages.
Picking up and passing tiny bowls of plants among audience members, she added a few dance-like steps and emphasized her sometimes lyrical soprano voice, matched with Europeanized string formalism before a climax that mixed spiccato string strokes with alternating high and low-pitched vocalizing.
Another vocal interaction took place during the second set on opening night from Toronto’s Plastic Babies trio.Some of the few performers who played on the gallery’s formal raised stage, the Babies mixed intermittent pedal-directed frails of guitarist Patrick O’Reilly with vocalization and Theremin textures from Christine Duncan, and the voice and synthesizer swells of Laura Swankey.
Based around vocal squeaks, wheezes, mumbles and shrieks, as well as the constant repetition of certain words or phrases, the singers created certain rhythmic intensity during the program, with hectoring locutions sometimes resembling defiant sloganeering. Clenched Theremin shakes and synthesizer whooshes mated with O’Reilly’s tabletop guitar plinks and banjo-like twangs as the vocalese ranged from Bedlam to ballads. The overriding message conveyed by Duncan – which could also serve as a WFS theme – was the shouted “Stand Up for What You Believe In”.
An enormous impact on the festival is made by the annual appearance of the 20-piece Women From Space Big Bang. This year its membership and instrumentation was so vast that seated players spread across the stage and others’ chairs covered more of the floor space in front of and beside the raised stage. With its ever-shifting personnel and repertoire, 2025’s iteration was dedicated to the music of Nina Simone. Arrangements were created by Canadian composers Mingjia Chen, Pursuit Grooves, Madeleine Ertel, Tania Gill and Alexa Belgrave with the performance mixed with live visuals by Meghan Cheng.
Happily, consistency was maintained throughout the performance as each composer conducting her work. Individual vocal solos and especially close harmonies among the six singers provided social and emotional context for the tunes, some of which were wedded to a particular time period.
Meanwhile, the expanded rhythm section of three idiophone players — electronics, synthesizer and electric bass — maintained a groove, and there were distinctive instrumental contributions from Bea Labikova’s booting baritone saxophone, Naomi McCarrol-Butler’s slurping bass clarinet, brassy trumpeting from Rebecca Henessey and especially fierce conga drumming from Yang Chen. However since Simone’s work was essentially vocal music, the intricacies that could have been added with expanded instrumental freedom were mostly neglected.
What wasn’t neglected, especially on the second night, was movement.
Stretching through a variety of almost gymnastic maneuvers which saw her sliding along the floor nearly as often as she was upright, long-limbed, barefoot Filipino-Canadian Chantelle Mostacho, whirled, twirled, jumped and contorted herself into positions from splits to pirouettes.
Clearly affiliated were the splooshes, crackles and drones created by hooded synthesizer player shn shn, who played alongside the dancer. The taxing physical scope of Mostacho’s performance made one wonder if she agreed with one lyric vocalized by the synth player: “Don’t want to lose myself”.
Japanese-born Butoh dancer azumi OE made the festival’s most spectacular entrance as the final act on WFS’ second night.
Clad in layers of fabric and a head-covering veil, she looked as if she had just floated in from the climax of a Japanese yūrei or ghost horror film.
Accompanied by Eucademix’s electronic sounds and changing lighting by Waldo Walle, OE moved poltergeist-like across the floor before turning to intense movement improvisations. Advancing and retreating to and from specially designed and positioned lighted poles, her spastic jerks, delicate gliding and even a crucifix pose suggested the prowling of a feral beast.
Women From Space organizers must be commended for constantly changing the yearly program and moving past the original credo to “celebrate and amplify the art of visionary women working in exploratory musical traditions”. Even more than in years past, new forms and variations were exposed in 2025 . However, in expanding the definition of exploratory to its most elastic form, the danger of it snapping from the friction is suggested. It is also one potential danger future WFS festival planners will likely consider.
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